Parking minimums are utter madness, and a big part of the issue in the US.

True.

However I was simple talking about an apartment complex in a relatively rural part of the country without access to public transit. There were about 55-60 parking spaces for 7 buildings of 46 apartments.

A comment he made to me once was “Nobody builds low-income housing. a mid-rise luxury condo will only cost a bit more to build than low income apartments, but you make a shitload more”

Yeah, I completely believe it.

Space-efficient middle housing for the poor and lower middle-class is not something we can rely on private companies to do in America. It’s something that is going to have to take government intervention.

The apartment complex I was in took up as much land as around 5-7 average sized new construction homes yet it housed 42 46(I actually remember two of the buildings having 8 apartments each) apartments. It was also in a part of the country where a car was basically required. There was space for every apartment to have at least 1 car and have space to spare. Realistically probably about 1.5 cars per apartment could fit parked in the complex.

Single family houses are an incredibly inefficient use of space and naturally cause greater sprawl, which means more cars and more roads (and consequently more emissions).

Trust me, I completely agree. I just have very low expectations of the American market and the American consumer. I figured that lots half as wide and half as deep could fit 4 times the number of “tiny” homes in the same area and it might entice many people who want a single family home to something more land efficient rather than a 2500sq-ft place.

I used to live in an apartment complex that had a number of buildings and each building had 6 apartments. I really liked it. One of the best places I ever lived, but unfortunately the management company decided that they need to constantly raise the rent. They ended up forcing a lot of people out.

True 😆

Smaller homes cost more or have HOA fees they can’t make work. Most all options have taxes they also can’t make work.

It’s pretty insane that America has virtually no supply of inexpensive small homes. It’s all about the 2500+ sq-ft behemoths that cost $400,000+.

Even though it’s a “worse” deal per sqft I think the market for sub $200,000 homes in the 500-750 sq-ft range would be absolutely booming if it existed.

Freeze the banana and then blend the frozen banana with peanut butter and a little almond/oat/other plant milk and it’s like a milkshake without the dairy. Amazingly good!

Unfortunately there’s a larger than you expect percentage of people out there who just think “fruit healthy” and that’s where the thought ends

Totally fair point. As usual I tend to overestimate the general public.

This seems like it would be really obvious, no?

If you are simply buying fruit juices at the store you are getting zero to virtually zero fiber. So you are getting a bunch of calories but without feeling any sense of fullness that you would get if you instead just ate the fruit.

Fruit is healthy but you are much better off just eating the fruit and drinking water. If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp. The fiber is excellent for you and will help prevent you from turning all that juice into “empty” calories.

No worries, I wasn’t trying to imply that to be honest. I liked your comment and was simply trying to add some extra information for anyone else that stumbled upon the thread.

I think statistically speaking the absolute best value is a 5 year old car that has been at least reasonably well-maintained. The vast majority of depreciation happens during those first 5 years.

For those that do need to finance a car, a three year loan term should be the maximum. I think you are 100% correct on that. There are people with car loans that have terms of 7 years. It’s sad that people are setting themselves up for failure like that. If you can’t afford the monthly payments on a 3 year term then you really can’t afford the car at all.

Those are good rules.

American cities used to be designed around reasonable things like walking and using Streetcars but then were bulldozed to make way for the automobile.

That’s a good point.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that in Japan the issue of loneliness cuts very deep due to the cultural and societal norms. I would also think that if you were to keep all those same norms but introduce in the car dependent design and infrastructure of the US then the problem would get even worse, no?

Cars have always been relatively expensive to own and operate and the American way, unfortunately, has been to take out lines of credit in order to purchase vehicles they could just barely afford.

It’s insane to think about but the average car payment for a new vehicle in 2023 was $726 and the average loan term is nearly 70 months!

I think the best thing I ever did was learn on a 250cc. It’s way harder to wreck your day or get yourself killed when you inevitably grab a bit too much throttle as a complete newbie. I would even encourage people to learn on a 125cc or even 50cc. The basics are the basics and you can pick those up on a bike with less than 10hp just as easily if not more easily than a bike with 100+hp.

It would be amazing to see government mandated limiters in cars, in general, and not just for learners.

I know that a lot of people don’t agree with that but the public has proved they are incapable of driving within reasonable limits. No one needs a car that can go the speeds that cars are capable of going. It’s totally possible to setup a system that enforces the limit only on public roads so that people could still take their cars to the track. We very much have the technology.

It blows my mind that the general public is completely accepting of things like smartphone OSes that can spy on their every move and log their every detail yet if you mention limiters on cars all of the sudden they become staunch advocates for personal freedoms. The hypocrisy blows my mind.

It’s ridiculous enough that we’re switching to electric cars with 0-100kph under 7 seconds and no one bats an eye…

This is a good point.

Nobody seems to care at all about acceleration even though it can be just as dangerous as sheer speed in the hands of most drivers.

I think quarantine is only for confirmed suspected infected items. Windows will move it and prevent any use of items until you confirm you want them, at which point they are just regular files and folders.

That actually does sound like what I remember. Maybe I was thinking about something else.

I did hear about something called “Controlled Access” a while back. It looks like it might be an option that could work in certain situations.

I’m not entirely sure about AMD but NVIDIA certainly seems keen on the AI market to the point that they don’t really care about the consumer gaming market anymore.

To be honest I stopped following PC hardware altogether because things were so stagnant

That’s exactly what happened to me as well.

It’s not exciting at all to pay attention to mediocre launches of expensive products. The GPU in my gaming PC is several generations old at this point but I don’t really care. There are still plenty of good games that will run fine on it and I’m just going to hold tight. There are games that I still have yet to purchase that will run fine on my hardware. I’m not going to give my money to terribly optimized games or games that require high-end hardware.

The more expensive PC gaming becomes the more high-end hardware doesn’t really matter. I think developers and publishers know that they need to target the average consumer because they need to sell volume on these games. If the average gamer is playing on older and/or lower end hardware then they need to service that market. There aren’t enough 4090 buyers to sell the volume they need to make money. Hell, at these prices I’m not sure there are even enough 4070 or even 4060 level buyers to do that. Tons of people lost interest and aren’t buying into this even if you still see posts online of people purchasing new GPUs.

I waited out the crypto market and I don’t have problems waiting longer.

I can’t give a ton of advice but I have done well in avoiding things like viruses through a combination of making sure that I always try and get torrents from more well-known and trusted sources and also by running Linux. I’m sure I have been previously saved simply due to running Linux.

It’s been a while since I have used Windows as a main OS so forgive me if it doesn’t work like this but I do remember Windows Defender having the ability to quarantine folders. Is it possible to quarantine your torrent downloads folder and scan it before you run anything that’s been downloaded? Even if that works it’s obviously not foolproof and will only prevent you from being infected by things that are caught in the scan, but it’s at least better than nothing.

Call me whatever, but Valve does so much for Linux gaming that when I do buy games I make sure to get them through Steam. Between Proton and the Steam Deck it seems like Valve is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Linux gaming is in a great place right now and Valve deserves a lot of credit.

They also have Steam Input which is incredible. The customization and control you have over your experience is insane.

Epic Games on the other hand can’t even be bothered to support Linux properly. Valve earns their cut.