1789

There are variable rate mortgages in the US. A common tactic is to get one of those, then refinance into a fixed rate loan in about five years, which is around the time the rate might change. If your property value goes up enough, you may be able to ditch the mortgage insurance then, too.

Any detail will do that, really.

Trump did not elaborate on who would be part of the “Election Integrity Army” or how large it would be.

It’s a dog whistle to the “militia” people.

“I was not an undercover agent, just your run of the mill insurrectionist.”

For some, both.

The Bible is a weird maniacal rambling mess, so that tracks?

No, that’s a free market, as I explained before you stopped reading.

You’re the only one talking about profit. I never have. Oh wait, I bet you don’t understand what profit is, either. That’s wealth gained above and beyond the value of the labor input, because the consumer price is higher than it needs to be and/or labor is being undercompensated for their work. Profit is what the ownership class takes from labor without adding any real value. Yes, that’s capitalism. Profit isn’t "I have this thing which is a manifestation of my labor, and I will exchange it with you fairly for something you have which is a manifestation of your labor. We might even use an agreed-upon third carrier of value (currency) to make our exchange simpler and fairer, and make it so that lots of things are readily exchanged between all sorts of people. That makes the fair distribution of wealth more efficient (ideally).

This will all make more sense when you’re out of your mom’s basement.

You realize that the farmers produce the peaches, right? And that if it costs more to harvest them that the peaches are worth, you don’t harvest them. Then you have a giant pile of rotten peaches anyway that has to be cleaned up, so maybe you harvest them anyway and take the loss yourself. Fine.

Now you - the farmer - have a surplus of peach trees that will grow new peaches, and those new peaches won’t sell either. You’ll take loss year after year this way. No, the best thing to do is to repurpose the land for something else, and that means uprooting the peach trees. It’s a good thing there’s federal grant money to absorb some of that cost.

Capitalism is where there’s an ownership class that contributes essentially nothing and a labor class that produces the value, and the former exploits the latter. This situation is not that; the farmer is (ideally) the labor (unless factory farms, or unfair compensation otherwise). The peaches having more or less worth due to market conditions is because of a free market, which is distinct from capitalism.

Growing crops is work. Harvesting crops is work. Transporting, processing, inspecting, warehousing, inventorying, packaging, retailing - all work. People - workers - expend effort to create the value of cans of peaches in pantries, and each person should be compensated fairly for the value their effort produces.

Never anywhere in my commentary did I refer to profits. If the peaches are worth less than they cost to harvest, the value of the labor already invested is lost, and the farm as a whole is at risk. Especially for the remaining family farms, this means that corporate farm companies will buy the land and consolidate their power. It’s a good thing there’s federal grant money to absorb some of the cost of retooling.

I’m as anti-capitalist as they come, and there’s parts of this situation to be justifiably pissed about. The fact that a single cannery closing results in this is one. The fact that the corporation that ran that cannery may well have closed it for profit reasons is another. But getting pissed about repurposing land for something more useful? Seems ill informed.

It’s not. No devices at night is super normal for kids who haven’t learned to regulate yet. It’s maybe a bit tighter than I would choose, but I still think it’s a fair balance at that age.

Granted, this was a little while back, but we raised our kids with semi-supervised internet, with regular reminders about “don’t even tell internet randos your real name.” By semi-supervised, I mean that the computer was in a relatively public place, and we’d check on them often - so they knew that a parent could be over their shoulder in a moment.

It’s definitely a balancing act. You want them to learn the computer and interpersonal skills but you don’t want them in real trouble. And so you have to be permissive with a taut leash.

They got phones in junior high, 11 or 12 years old. Another balance between safety and “this is how kids communicate now”. They got a healthy foundation with previous exposure/experience, so we felt they could handle that. Yes, there were times when we had to temporarily confiscate a phone, and the other rule was “parents get to look at your phone whenever they want for any or no reason”. We exercised that clause, too.

They’re all grown now and all appear to be using technology in healthy ways. We’re lucky that the balance we tried to strike actually stuck.

ESH

Welp

You are absolutely correct, and I should have considered that aspect.

Maggie’s Farm by RATM.

Social Distortion did a good job with Johnny Cash.

The cannery closed. That’s why this is happening.

Just install an adverb blocker.

Language evolves.

The agents that decode natural language inputs to return search results are different from the ones that generate output.

Generative AI is the wooooorst, that’s what takes up the most resources, and then produces questionable output.