• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

    I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

    I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

    I would have thought that was abundantly clear.





  • First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

    Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

    Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.



  • I’ll change my socks every day, and more if I’m swapping out workout clothes for fresh clothes.

    Oddly, I really don’t experience foot odor. Other bits can get rather ripe, but whether I’m wearing boots or going barefoot, my feet just do t get funky. That said, I have had athlete’s foot and I’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t change their socks after days of marching and working in the field. I know it’s not a major danger for me at this point, but I’ve got a whole drawer full of socks, and in any case I want them to match with my shoes and pants.


  • I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

    My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

    In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

    It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.





  • That’s also what general happens in the US if you die without a will. It’s called intestate succession. If your spouse survives you, they will generally get everything held as community property. If you had property prior to the marriage, it might be divided among your children, if any. Of there are no immediate family (spouse and/or children), it can then be divided among any relatives you do happen to have.

    If you have any valuable assets that you want to bequeath to someone in particular, then it’s important to have a will. If you want a bigger chunk of money to go to a relative you know is struggling financially or could otherwise use it (kids heading to college, buying a house, whatever), then that’s another reason to have a will. Of instead of a family member, you want the money to go to a charity, then that’s yet another reason.



  • I bought the steam deck with the largest storage available, and still ended up picking up a 1Tb SD card. I wouldn’t end up tossing that idea unless you have a modest library without a lot of the big footprint games.

    I’ve reached that point where I’ll spend some extra money to avoid the inconvenience of having to redownload a game if it’s at all unavoidable, and the internal storage gets filled up a lot faster than you’d think. You know your own library and habits, but you might be happy to have one on hand.