yacht_boy @ yacht_boy @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Thanks! Although I proposed 15 years ago and we've been married 13 :)

Besides the face unlock, the 12s and newer have magsafe charging and it's a delight.

The engagement ring I proposed to my wife with. She said yes.

Lol at the down votes because people don't understand that the far left and the far right are just the same place.

Venezuela?

I used to feel the same way, but then I was standing in a (short) global entry line and I watched people breeze right by that. Found out they were just using the free CBP app. Felt a little cheated, honestly.

Haven't been doing as much international travel since second kid was born, so we didn't get him global entry. Last trip we did I used the app instead. It was just as fast as global entry, possibly faster.

The only real reason to get global entry again now is for tsa ore check, and there are easier and cheaper ways to get that.

Peace corps is amazing but it's quite a process to get in and I believe it's a 2 year commitment. If you want to do that you'll likely need to quit your job entirely.

Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn't had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don't think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.

Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I'm trapped and can never sell.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they'll keep going even if things aren't great, but they'll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there's a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we'll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it's just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There's no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there's not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there's a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

I mean, lots of people do. Just not the ones here on lemmy. But thanks for the compliment!

I'm probably somewhat unique here inasmuch as I'm a real estate agent and landlord and I have made an attempt to get into commercial real estate. But I've also been homeless in my adult life and grew up with very unstable housing, so I get the angst of many people here and don't discount it. Their feelings are completely valid.

I think the two things that people who are concerned about housing prices get wrong consistently are housing supply and the importance of financing.

Left leaning people are forever fighting against landlords and simultaneously yelling about gentrification and development. Here's the thing. Housing was affordable when we let people build densely with relatively few restrictions. Housing today is still most affordable in places where it's easy to build more. If that means the neighborhood character changes, oh well. Anywhere you get liberal people (and I count myself as very left wing) making rules about housing, you limit supply, prices go up. In the immortal words of pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Take a look at Tokyo, the NYT did a great story about it recently, they have no problem destroying old neighborhoods to build more housing. As a result, it's remained shockingly affordable, and has a huge percentage of small businesses because rent is cheap for small non residential spaces, too. We need to stop clinging to our old buildings and allow growth. And I say that as a man who lovingly restored a 175 year old house. It is dumb. There should be 6 families living on the plot I own, but the neighbors would never allow it.

The other thing is financing. Commercial owners have a completely different borrowing structure from owner occupied housing. They don't have 30 year fixed rate low interest loans with low down payments and government programs to help them for x, y and z. Most commercial loans require refinancing every 5, 7, or 10 years. They also cost more than residential loans, both in up front costs and interest. So my personal residence is locked in on a 30 year note at 3%, but my rentals are in the 3.75-6% range and will require me to refinance in a few years at much higher rates. I have one that resets in 18 months. My interest rate is likely to go from 3.75 to 7.75. I owe about 100k on the house. My mortgage payments will go up $4000/year when that happens (on top of a $1000/year insurance hike last month). There's no possible way I can raise my rent enough to cover. So I would be in the hole every month. But the bank won't lend on a property that loses money every month. So either I come up with $100k cash or I sell the house. Sorry tenant, but you're getting kicked out at lease expiration next year because I have to sell the house to py back the lender. If it won't cash flow for me it won't for anyone else, either. So the only possible buyers are home buyers who want to live in it and it needs to be vacant. Yay for a home buyer, sad for my tenant (and for me, now I am out a cash flowing property that I'd prefer to hold). The tenant will yell about greedy landlords when I tell him to get out, but I literally have no option.

Same thing with how all big developments look the same now. All driven by lenders. They won't lend to a developer who wants to take on mom and pop businesses and quirky startups. The building is valued as a multiple of its rents, and so all the money chases national credit tenants or strong local chains that have proven they can oy high rents, and lenders all want to see recognizable name brands in those ground floor retail spaces. Developers hands are tied. Lots of developers would love to do something different but nothing different can get financed.

I could keep going but the text wall is long enough and my thumbs are tired.

Banks don't buy properties, they foreclose on them. They will unload as fast as possible and take a write down.

Big hedge fund and other similar large investors don't hold onto money losers, and they care about maximizing their return. If the spread between rent and sales price is this high, I'd expect some of the ones that bought a while ago to be considering selling and taking their appreciation gains vs holding onto a cash flow that is multiples lower. Plus corporate lending is a completely different animal than homeowner loans and many of these properties will soon be needing to refinance into a much higher rate. Their owners will sell rather than take a huge hit to cash flow. And many of these bought properties 5-10 years ago and did capital upgrades that are now aging. They'll be looking to exit before the next upgrade cycle.

Smaller investors can get pretty badly burned in these markets and may not be able to hold on.

Not saying a crash is inevitable or even likely, but real estate is cyclical and we are almost certainly near the top of our current cycle.

The general populace? No. The state government? Yes.

I used to love Florida, but it's doomed. Between climate change and fascism we just need to write off the state entirely and build a wall along the Georgia border. Best we can do is try to control the insanity and let those who have decided to stay down there burn themselves out. Better for you to get out than for us to come down.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don't invest in Detroit real estate

Depends on how you define that. Literally none of the communities I was part of on reddit have a functioning equivalent here.

Boston? Dozens of posts a day on reddit, maybe one a week here.

Burning man? I don't even know if there have been a dozen posts in the community here.

Geology? Don't think I've seen a single post.

Communities for specific bands (I'm a jamband fan) exist here but have no are almost no content.

And so on.

I'm the kind of user who comments often but doesn't post much. With no one here posting, there's nothing for me to interact with.

If you want echo chamber liberal political memes, obscure open source software discussions, or endless hentai, then lemmy is great. But it has no pull for people who want to participate in niche communities like mine. Hopefully it'll happen, especially as reddit gets shittier and shittier, but even for people like me who desperately want to leave reddit and are willing to take a chance on a new platform, this is a tough sell.

It's going to take a few more digg type events to really get lemmy to pick up enough users to make the conversations in the small niche communities hit critical mass. Until then, lots of people will give it a try, then bounce.

Sounds like a challenge. I'll bring the Cuervo, you bring the Beam, let's get drunk and sing God Save the Queen!

Do you allow NSFW content by default? I'm no prude, but I had to turn it off just because there was so much hentai and related porn.

I'm not an expert but my general understanding is that its unlikely you'd have both parents be narcissists. A true narcissist is too self absorbed to stay in a relationship with someone else who's also that self absorbed. Narcissists tend to be in relationships with people who have opposite traits, highly empathetic and easily manipulated. Not saying it can't happen but youtube isn't necessarily the best diagnostic tool.

If at all possible, I recommend you see if there are any counseling resources available to you at school or through your local government. Also recommend you read some actual books on the subject, not just get info from YouTube and the internet. Hopefully you live in a place with a public library. Many libraries have a way to check out ebooks and read them on a phone app, which may easier and more discreet.

And I'd urge you to remember two things.

First, it gets better. It can be hard to believe, and it can feel like forever, but it gets better.

Second, narcissism is just another reaction to a traumatic childhood. No one is born a monster. They're worthy of compassion, even if you can't have a functional relationship with them.

This is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The last paragraph is so good.

In another indication of the operators working to potentially inefficient quotas, Meta noted that the pages it had on Facebook, with around 560,000 followers, “were likely acquired from spam operators with built-in inauthentic followers primarily from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil” meaning the pages “that mainly posted in Chinese and English were almost exclusively followed by accounts from countries outside of their target regions.”