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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DO
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2
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237
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • One way or the other, you're paying every month. Either it's rent (paying for the landlord's house, including taxes, insurance and interest), or you're paying towards your own. The general populous has never really been able to buy a house outright. One way or another you're mortgaging your time to spread out the time to either pay for a house, or pay for property and building your own.

    Yes, people have been going WAY to far into debt, pushing the size and prices of houses to unsustainable levels. Hell my mom grew up just fine with 5ppl (2 parents, 3 kids) in an 800sqft house (plus a tiny finished attic) with 1 bathroom. Nobody really needs 2500-4000sqft houses.

    But even if we go back to reasonably sized homes, in no realistic world are mortgages going away.

    The best you can hope for is to live as cheaply as possible to save up a large down payment (and emergency fund), and buy only as much house as you really need, for as little interest as you can manage, and then pay it off as quickly as you can.

  • Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I'm not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!

  • Per Wikipedia.

    • Czechoslovakia

      On January 1, 1993, all Czechoslovak citizens automatically became citizens either of the Czech Republic or the Slovak Republic, based on their previous citizenship, permanent residence address, birthplace, family ties, job and other criteria. Additionally, people had one year's time to claim the other citizenship under certain conditions.

    I think things were a LOT uglier in the breakup of Yugoslavia, as well as the partition of India and Pakistan.

    So it could go either way.

  • Like everything else, it's a risk trade-off calculation. On the one hand, I'd love to leave now, but If we leave before 2029, it could cost us potentially $1-3million in teacher retirement pension. (spread across 20-30+ years as my wife can retire quite early because she started so young)

    So one must balance the risk of Texas really seceding vs the financial cost of leaving early.

    At this stage, while it's a 'fun' (I use that term very loosely) thought experiment, I think the likelihood of Texas actually seceding is pretty low. If at some point it starts to look like it's actually likely, then we'll reevaluate if it makes sense to let go of that much money.

  • At this point I think Biden needs to just call their bluff. He should come back with, "Okay, here's all the plans we've drawn up to go into effect as soon as you ratify your secession."

    Then present the plans that include cessation of all federal subsidies to all public and private Texas entities, removal of all US military personnel and equipment, removal of all other federal agencies and personal (eg. Federal Border Patrol, Park rangers, IRS), removal of the Federal reserve in Dallas, the construction of border walls around the state in NM, OK, AR, and LA asking with placement of the removed border patrol there, and so on.

    Let them stew for a bit and chew on just how utterly fucked this state (yeah I live in TX, and early awaiting the day we can leave) would be if they really did successfully secede.

  • A rarity, but Maine Root has(had?) a drink called "Pink Drink", a carbonated Prickly Pear Lemonade. I had it at the Austin City Limits festival. It was, without a doubt the most refreshing drink I've ever consumed. I usually drink mostly water (free) at the festival, but that year we spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $60-80 just on cups of Pink Drink because we couldn't get enough of it.

    I really, really, REALLY wish they sold bottles of it, but as far as I can tell, it's only occasionally available and only as a fountain drink.

  • Just cancelled Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and Hulu about an hour ago.

    Still have Max (included in cell phone plan), Prime (mainly for shipping) and AppleTV+ because it's cheap, and I've had a harder time f successfully getting many of their shows on the seven seas.

    For music we're stuck in a bit of a disagreement on what service to consolidate down to. I use YouTube Music because it includes add-free videos and because I was a long time user of Google Play Music (which was awesome). Wife likes Pandora Premium (Pandora has the best 'stations' with per-station thumbs-up/down), one kid has years of stuff on Napster(nee Rhapsody), and the other kid has all their stuff and friends playlists on Spotify.

  • I was under the impression that software like PowerDVD could play 4K HDR media if you're using Windows.

    And at the end of the day, it is also (generally accepted as 'probably') legal to decrypt the media using whatever other methods available as long as you are only doing so to back up or enable viewing for yourself.

  • While I could easily get more than $10mil with my current knowledge (assuming I go back in time to 6yrs old), I would not have the same wife or child as I do now, and there's no way I'll give them up, so I'll just take the $10mil now .