MalHierba

MalHierba t1_j6i4aii wrote

I paid my landlord 4 months at a time but it was because I was new to the country and couldn’t pass their equivalent of a credit check since I couldn’t open a local bank account yet. It was a compromise because he was worried about renting to a young foreign student in the country temporarily. He also gave me a slight discount in the process. Otherwise you are just giving them an interest free loan.

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MalHierba t1_j1mvkf1 wrote

The market is an absolute shit show. There is no proper regulation and while monopolies can be taken advantage of and be terrible for society, some things like energy operate most efficiently as monopolies and might even be called a natural monopoly. Now I think natural monopolies should be nationalized and protected from corruption but that’s a different convo. The solar industry is millions of little marketing firms, dealing with dozens to hundreds of installers in each state. It’s a shit show and inefficient and there are a bunch of dumb salesmen who don’t even know their products very well who are just making a killing and rarely creating the ideal system and financing for their clients. There are also a lot of tariffs.

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MalHierba t1_iuhr5t9 wrote

I literally just moved here a month ago but I have visited a few time in the past 5 years and used it on those trips too. I lived in Brooklyn for a year and a half around 2018. In between then, I lived in Madrid, couple Italian cities, Athens, and Lisbon. And I visited the vast majority of European countries. DC metro as it is today is likely not a top 100 metro in the world.

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MalHierba t1_iuhptyc wrote

Keyword in the US. This country is a joke when it comes to public transport. The DC metro is ok. Still 100 times worse than European public transpo. You can go to random small cities in Bulgaria and Hungary and the metros in 100k people cities will put american metros to shame. Actually big cities like Vienna and Madrid have metros that look like something out of the future compared to our own.

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