scarabic

scarabic t1_jcys7w7 wrote

In fact a 100 year old house likely has some choice lumber in its stair treads. A century ago we were still tearing through old growth forests and the lumber in old houses is tighter grained than anything you even CAN buy today. There’s a reason why recovered lumber is so prized, and it’s not because it looks all “old timey.”

If OP does replace all the treads, I hope the old ones go to a woodworker somewhere. Shit I’d be happy to have them.

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scarabic t1_jcj6pvg wrote

I was reading Little House on the Prairie to my kid and we got to the chapter where one of their horses births a colt. I thought “wow, and in our age we just run cars until they stop working and then have to buy another - what a shit deal.”

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scarabic t1_jabhrap wrote

Just don’t pressure wash. Use a scrub brush and appropriate herbicide/fungicide. Pressure washers will tear right into old wood. A lot of decks have been ruined this way. It looks like they’re cleaning AMAZINGLY while you’re pressure washing, but that’s because it’s blasting layers away right down to bare wood.

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scarabic t1_j1xjq9u wrote

Um. My dude. No, I didn’t just forget about my down payment (which immediately becomes equity anyway - you knew that, right?).

The rest of this we tracked continuously and at tax time. If you’ve never owned, maybe it seems hopelessly complex and expensive to you. I can’t tell if that’s it or you just tried so hard to puff up that list that it became ridiculous. Furniture!

Anyway keep renting since you find it morally superior to be exploited than exploit. I won’t take that away from you, just the illusion that you’re somehow not involved.

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scarabic t1_j1xgalo wrote

Yeah maybe that metaphor is pretty obtuse.

What I mean is that speculation bubbles don’t always have much basis in real value. Housing in particular is highly leveraged. People buy a house without having all the money for it. Banks lend them the money but they’re not entirely liquid either. The mortgage gets sold and resold, bundled into investment vehicles and derivatives. Families count on their house to be some kind of “investment” and rely on the bubble to fund their retirement. It’s a big network of over-leveraged actors. It stumbles onward largely on its own momentum, but it can be totally hollow, a bubble, a “zombie.”

Renters on the other hand pay cash in hand everywhere they go. Nothing they do is permitted to be a loan or leverage. Whenever renters appear in the diagram, actual cash is flowing in. “Blood infusion.”

Maybe I meant vampire, not zombie.

To offer an example: I bought my first home in 2006, right before the big crash. I got a loan with very little down during the subprime lending spree. Then the crash happened and I wound up upside down on the mortgage. Shortly after I also needed that freedom to “vote with my feet” and move that you speak of. Know what I did? I rented the place out. I paid the mortgage, taxes, and repairs with the rent cash while the market recovered. Even pocketed some monthly profit. And once the market roared back, I sold the place at a big profit.

I was the person over-leveraged, actually at negative value, the zombie, but by feeding on renters, I was eventually made whole.

So when you say you rent because you l’re disgusted by the whole speculation market, I don’t see how that’s a solution. The buyers/sellers are still feeding on you as a renter. You’re maybe the only party in the entire picture who is always there with ready cash in hand, while everyone else is engaged in a gang-bang of credit leverage.

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scarabic t1_j1wyw9b wrote

The difference is you can buy houses on credit, leverage. In a hot market, borrowing is cheap and speculation drives speculation. Rent, meanwhile, is always paid in cash. Rent is the transfusion of actual blood into what is otherwise a zombie of speculation and credit. It props up the rat race. And renters are getting squeezed hard as the balloon grows.

Sure renting has advantages. Easier to move. Predictable costs. But now we’re on a different subject. We started on rent being some kind of way out of the housing market shit show, and unfortunately it totally isn’t.

Sure, you’re paying rent for something but your rent is often paying the entire mortgage of someone else who is just sitting back gaining equity. It’s hard to say you’re throwing money away but impossible to say you’re winning or not part of the game.

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scarabic t1_j0shw1z wrote

Yes the only way the gas gets into your lungs is if you let the liquid sit in your mouth while you inhale. This is a great way to choke on the liquid, and will barely get any gas into your lungs anyway.

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scarabic t1_izd8pr8 wrote

The same answer goes all the way down really. There’s not a single chemical process or pathway anywhere in your entire metabolism that wasn’t invented in bacteria before multicellular life came about. Even photosynthesis originated in bacteria, long before there were plants.

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scarabic t1_iz0wsan wrote

You know what's really depressing? DeBeers recently contracted Lupita Nyong'o to be their Brand Ambassador. You might remember her from the Black Panther movies - films about a sovereign African nation with a very valuable resource which they protect from exploitation by the outside world. I can't fathom how Lupita thought this was a good idea. I'm sure DeBeers will say that all of their businesses are "conflict free" NOW, but this company should be boycotted forever any anyone with a conscience.

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scarabic t1_iz0w3s2 wrote

Yes whether you are using humans to mine or machines to synthesize, you can set up work in parallel, so duration to produce 1 diamond seems like a useless metric to me. Cost per karat would be more interesting.

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scarabic t1_iy26vw8 wrote

You could say the presence of atoms is a promising indicator that life could have been there. After all, life isn’t possible without atoms! And we know that on earth, living things leave many atoms behind!

See how silly this sounds? It’s the same with “organic compounds.” No, it doesn’t mean anything on its own unless the types and concentrations of them are unlikely to occur naturally. Which we did not get any indication of from this video.

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