Yeah, I’m generally ok if somebody is charging a reasonable rent which covers their reasonable mortgage, so long as they’re still taking care of all the other stuff (repairs, city taxes, etc).

What burns me is people who either a) knowingly buy in a hot, excessively priced market with full intent to charge excessive rents while providing absolutely minimal service or support

b) bought 10+ years ago but have pumped up rents to the same as those who bought at mortgages 2-3x the rate, citing “market rates” and often doing sketchy things to raise rents including renovictions etc, while being shitty - often absentee - slumlords

Maybe I’m showing my age, but there did used to be quite a good number of mom & pop type landlords who weren’t shit, and while the commercial ones cost a bit more there was a decent mix.

Now, the commercial ones are actually mostly a safer bet in small cities. They’ll raise rent every year but consistently, and the decent ones are pretty prompt about repairs and not fucking people over deposits etc. There are bad ones but it’s pretty easy to tell which are which. The problem is of course that availability at the good ones is lower and they do cost more.

Good private landlords are increasingly hard to come by, as the best ones generally end up quitting after either getting too old or after a bad tenant experience, while the slumlords have leveraged their existing properties to finance buying more and more, leading to a market full of increasingly overpriced mould-monsters.

Oh for sure. I’m not knocking those that can do it, just that my regular soldering skills are shit enough that I’d probably be hesitant to reball something more complicated even with the right gear :-)

Ah. Other than fixing the old Xbox360 RROD , I’ve never needed to do any BGA work, just circuit soldering

What’s the IR bottom heater for?

Insurance and ownership papers here generally require a primary owner here, at least on paper

Outdoor temperature in °C, unless you’re talking about an outdoor pool then it’s often enough °F :-)

I think part of the reasons it’s so mixed might just be due to how many Amero-centric devices and parts are common between the two countries.

Y’all can take your shitty Phillips screws though. Roberts is by far superior ;-)

I try to find uses for ours where we can. I have a BBQ with a dead sparker so I usually use a half-tube which I light on fire and drop by the burner before turning on the gas

My doctor is a pretty cool guy and some of the banter during my visits has been fun. If there weren’t potential legal implications (for him) I’d totally be down with grabbing a drink after hours and shooting the shit.

Maybe I could invite the dentist that did my root canal too, he was going into the same industry as me before switching to dentistry and was also pretty savvy.

Yeah, there’s a reason people prefer Kindle e-ink type e-readers to just using a tablet like a Kindle Fire, even if the latter can do more stuff

I’ll take a shot:

The word “Karen” has taken root in the last decade or so, describing a certain type of (generally female) personality. But why?

Well, that would likely be because it was a very popular name within a certain generation that also displays a fairly common set of behaviour among female members. The epitome of that behavior is one of privilege combined with victimhood.

But "Karen " isn’t a person, it’s a behavior model, and those “Karen’s” had kids (often plenty of them), and created subsequent generations that often learned similar behaviour.

These same people then twist concepts of feminism - which should mean equality - to mean superiority by:

• Expecting been to be in touch with their partner’s feelings, but making the latter take precedent.

• Expecting men to take on more traditionally “pink” work (cooking, cleaning, gardening etc) but not being involved in “blue” work (repairs, mowing the lawn, garbage, etc)

• Expecting men to spend more time involved with the children but also expecting them to do all that other stuff that takes up time, while simultaneously paying less attention to they kids themselves (stuck to a phone with kids stuck to a screen)

–

This can include stuff like:

Getting upset because of stuff like “you haven’t taken me out to dinner in a long time” while ignoring the part where that’s because the credit card hasn’t been paid off since that “girls retreat” a month ago that “I totally needed and deserved”. Any argument to the contrary is not taking into consideration [female]'s feelings, worth, and hard work.

Killing a discussion about [male]'s worth and feelings with “well you did/do X and that makes me feel terrible” (even if X occured weeks/months/years ago, and never mind if things go beyond feelings and into domestic violence. A man is expected to take it and NEVER raise a hand, even in defence.

Equality has been killed by “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”.

We don’t just see this reflected in relationships. Look at the crazies who will scream their entitlement at wait staff, or even police. Notice that the counter arguments become increasingly “I [don’t] deserve this treatment” while ignoring the behaviour leading to it. Girls literally choose not to learn cooking, sewing etc because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed into “traditional roles”

So we end up with people like this, whose entire outlook on life is based on what they believe they deserve, with nothing to say how they should act, and everything is always somebody else’s fault. Men just fall into one of those “somebody else” categories.

And boys that are raised under these same household? They see their fathers go from proud to beaten-down and often broke after divorce etc. Is it a wonder that many are now growing up to not want relationships or to start a family of their own? It’s terrifying.

Now I’m not going to say that this is all women. I’ve met great women and an proud to be friends with many who are intelligent, self-sufficient, and (hopefully) absent of most of the bullshit above. However, there are an increasing - and rather frightening - number who appear to subscribe to the above, attempting to find a man who “deserves” them (i.e be perfect) without looking at what they bring to the table other than a nice TikTok/Insta profile.

The reality is, a good relationship is a combination of the foundation you start with, what you put in, and sometimes a bit of luck. You need concrete and clean water on solid ground to start. That doesn’t work if one person is contributing just sand or water.

Be realistic. The background should contain Putin, Xi, and various others

They don’t read them for the ads , but if you’re bored and on the shitter for an extended period you may read them anyways

My phone regularly suggests words or names I’ve never used in my life, so I don’t think it’s a good indicator of my personal beliefs

While I am on the shitter might actually the most effective time for an ad. It used to be pretty common to keep magazines by the can and those had ads for sometimes interesting stuff

Yeah, people have said that they thought I’d love the idea of a brain implanted computer so I could do cool hacker shit or VR.

Like, noooooo that’d be like the Matrix run by the upper management suites of Boeing and Microsoft.

“Yeah we’re sorry hackers broke in and stole all your childhood memories but we couldn’t apply any security updates because the QA team had to be fired after the last one left them all barking like dogs and pissing on trees, . Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in BrainOS 9.8. You’ll need to pay for that updated but we’re now offering a choice between our premium $1500/mo subscription model or new ads-in-your-dreams model for $600/mo”

Given that there appear to be plenty of overseas sellers that will happily counterfeit a UL stamp, or copy an entire product - including UL stamp - but with different innards, how would we even know at this point?

I’m in Canada. Even smaller cities are absolutely fucked for house prices or rent right now

I’ll add to this: it was also from an age where necessities were fairly readily available at basic income levels (in most cities) and through a lifetime you could get ahead and upgrade your house along the way while supporting a family on a single person’s income.

Now you can have two people making a decent income and still have issues affording rent/mortgage. Necessities have gone up significantly while stuff like TVs have become cheaper but also shorter-lived.

Security products of this nature need to be tight with the kernel in order to actually be effective (and prevent actual rootkits).

That said, the old mantra of “with great power” comes to mind…

I remember reading that having a version keyword in your user alias would cause issues with steam, and it was actually because it was a blocked word on CloudFlare where they store/pull a bunch of steam data from