While true, I was thinking more about how the person you replying to probably was reacting to the trend of people talking about saving and waiting until they had a reasonable downpayment before they would consider entering the market, and how the market keeps running away from their downpayment savings.

The ‘never make a downpayment regardless of context’ would be bad advice, but I just presume there is a context in mind about not even having the downpayment to start with and being stuck on the rental treadmill as a result.

Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.

This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.

If you declare you want 100k, but let’s say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That’s likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you’ll end up saving on interest, you’ll more than lose out on rent.

Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you’d save.

WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.

This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.

Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.

So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.

I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.

I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).

Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.

While true, I have been scratching my head wondering why this rash of ads is happening, why they are so intent on making sure everyone knows their election participation is available to all.

One possibility: if you sit it out, people will know and blame you if your candidate loses.

Another possibility: if you vote, and the “wrong” person wins, you’ll be suspected of voting for the “wrong” person.

I don’t know which they are going for, but it has tickled my “creepy” meter, and this was before I saw it associated specifically with Trump/Vance (the ads I’ve seen mention no candidate and just seems a vague go out and vote pitch)

Yeah, that localization was one of the reasons that was so well loved. The PSP redid all that and while still enjoyable, it wasn’t quite as compelling as the WD effort.

Babbage’s

I think turn based is fine and in fact I like. However, when no one has a turn it’s annoying to sit around while nothing happens as the timer keeps ticking. Also, to make it “active”, the turn timer doesn’t stop when you hit the menu. If you delay your action the enemy may get to take their turn, just because you neglected to navigate the menu. I think ATB is actually the worst of both worlds, would prefer either turn based or action RPG rather than being forced to navigate a menu in some facsimile of ‘real time’.

Where FF7 kind of went south from a gameplay perspective compared to 6 was that in 6, summons were a brief flash. In FF7, by contrast, for example Knights of the round would “treat” you to an 80 second spectacle, which was cool the first couple of times, but then just a tedious waste of time. Generally rinse and repeat this for any action that was pretty quick in FF6 and before but a slow spectacle in FF7, with no real option to speed up those animations you had already seen a dozen times that wore out their welcome long ago. Just like that stupid chest opening in OOT.

Anyway, I did enjoy FF7, but the “game” half was kind of iffy.

Thing is those criticisms also mostly apply to FF7.

Disconnect between combat and exploration? I see that for Zelda, but ff7 goes harder, with a random encounter jolting you into a different game engine for combat.

To much time in combat waiting while nothing happens? FF7 battle system is mostly waiting for turns to come to with lots of dead time.

Exploration largely locked to narrative allowing it? Yeah, FF7 had that too, with rare optional destinations a very prescribed order and forced stops. It opens up late in the game.

The video generally laments that OOT was more a playable story than an organic gameplay experience, and FF7 can be characterized the same way. Which can be enjoyable, but it can be a bit annoying when the game half of things is awkward and bogs things down a bit. Particularly if you are getting subjected to repeated “spectacle” (the slow opening of chests in oot, the battle swirl, camera swoops, and oh man the summons in ff7…)

They both hit some rough growing pains in the industry. OOT went all in on 3D before designers really got a good idea on how to manage that. FF7 had so much opportunity for spectacle open up that they sometimes let that get in the way. Also the generally untextured characters with three design variations that are vastly different (field, battle, and pre rendered) as that team try to find their footing with visual design in a 3d market.

Agreed, as a game, as in fun, ff7 wasn’t very good. That music, those visual designs (the pre rendered stuff), and the story (though it suffered from bad localization) were compelling. But random encounters, fights filled with mostly waiting to be able to do things, the best attacks doing too much spectacle which was nice the first time, but pretty boring on repetition… The materia management became frustrating as you got more party members and no way to arrange or search, even with in game dialog mentioning how it was a pain…

Chrono Cross actually had significantly better game design, with enemies on screen and no standing around waiting for some characters turn to come up before anything would happen. Wish ff7 had clipped the “no action allowed by either side” time and that would have helped immensely. Then it just becomes a matter of if the player prefers real time adventure to menu driven play.

Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

The other day sometime similar happened to me. I mean I was used to that sort of crap on some dubious downloads, but most recently it was a pretty reputable software from it’s actual reputable site, and there were like a half dozen “DOWNLOAD” buttons in boxes and arrows and like a tiny actual download link. Made me research whether that site has been hijacked since I had last used it, and folks were saying it just went that way. Still very reluctant to grab it on any system I vaguely care about or keep anything remotely sensitive, since indulging in those sorts of ads destroys any twist I might have had.

Yes. For a long time I was trying to “play nice” and not go adblock. I didn’t mind ads that were unobtrusive and figured I’d roll with the ads for the sake of the sites. With things looking like this, and deliberately having ads load a little late and relayout the page to replace a link just as you were about to click in it, and ones that slipped even the pretense and pop up and ad instead of the actual link or button the first time. I would tend to just close such sites in disgust, and told my Google feed to not give me contemt from a couple of the worst owners that recurred.

The final straw was a site that made the play embedded video function be ads the first two times on clicking it, as well as looking like that. On top of just having to give up on sites more and more.

I read that majority of Internet users now use ad blockers. That didn’t used to be the case, and the large chunk of sites like this I’m sure is why.

Well, on one hand you had one line in a table in a formal web page.

On the other, you had that very awkward phrasing (if he merely meant ‘latest’):

because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,

But maybe that was a misunderstanding and he did mean ‘latest’, but in the flurry of internet coverage, Microsoft never issued a statement highlighting the misunderstanding. Instead they let that run rampant.

In fact, it was very consistent with a lot that happened with Windows 10:

• The mass “free to upgrade for everyone going back to 7” toward the goal of getting their userbase largely on a consistent vintage that is more supportable
• The twice a year major updates that were pitched as ‘new features and functions’, with a more ‘rolling release’ feel

So while certainly that one lifecycle page did have it stated, I have to wonder why Microsoft was mum on the subject even as their community was ‘getting it wrong’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reality is that they were seriously considering it. That guy might have even meant ‘last’ because he thought the ‘eternal update’ camp were going to win out.

which currently only has about one year of support left, officially

Well, no, “Version 23H2” only has one year of support. The 24H2 update will likely happen and likely have support until 2026. They do not list a retirement date for “Windows 11”, only for the updates.

You are right that for 10, the formal documentation listed an EOL. I can also believe that the “last version” was started by a misunderstanding. However, that “Windows 10 is the last version” spread hard and Microsoft made no effort to correct that at all. If there’s one thing internet sites love more than over-speculating about a potential mis-speak, it’s showing their fellow internet sites to be morons by posting Microsoft statements clarifying things. So Microsoft had to have noticed and still opted not to interject. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some “we are going to make Windows 10 a rolling release” sentiment bouncing around at Microsoft. It would be consistent with how they declared that new features and deprecations would come twice a year.

Problem is part of the standard allows the server to require attestation. So congratulations, they only bless their app, or maybe they only bless iphones.

If the service ignores that, then yes, it’s great. It’s as yet unpopular so it’s hard to know, but in adjacent industries I have seen them lock down the to the point it’s as asinine as “open your app to continue”

Who ys watchyng this yn the year of oure lord sixteen forty?