50 year mortgages on buildings with a 25 year design life. They are just time shifting the problem onto the next generation.

Begin Rant:

I have found that any ‘weird feeling’ I have that effectively causes more useless and unnecessary things to be purchased is almost certainly been ingrained in our culture by some ancient and effective advertisement campaign. Giving cash is tacky, giving gift cards shows you care more; They should be able to guess what I want for a gift; Wedding Registers; Anniversary Gift Tiers (year of Paper?); Etc.

I don’t even bother checking anymore when I encounter something like that - I just try to recognize it when some POS has mind fucked me by having previously brainwashed one of my ancestors and try to restore sane thought.

Any unease and obligation can be replaced with the certainty that Cash is always welcome and useful, at least for now. That said, if you have some true knowledge, or genuine interesting and an attainable plan then by all means act decisively.

:End Rant

Ok, but when they do the movie can we get Matt Damon to reprise his character from the Green Zone who transferred to the navy in disgust after the events of that movie, and he gets to say lines like “I’m so sick of this shit”, looking straight at the camera, while boarding fishing boats looking for drugs from ‘sure thing’ intel?

I didn’t watch the end of that one, but I assume he lived to the end??

This might just be my insomnia talking, but I thought a reasonable idea might be to call and reduce the available credit by however much is comfortable. For me, it would be fairly reasonable to reduce it by 50%. I assume they use some kind of magicians handshake to value their company based on how much potential credit is out there… Maybe it’d do nothing though. Anyone know?

She does realize she has a majority government and is fully responsible for the current status (whatever that may be)? If she is so incapable in doing her job that the relative quality of life has dropped to such a degree, perhaps she should deport herself into the sun.

‘nice watch!’ then move in and quietly say “oh, hey, it looks like your barber missed a spot back there”

You just need to understand how to talk to them:

We bring the foreigners in, give them a first class AMERICAN education and then send them back into the world. They now are effectively a double-agent, preferring to deal with Americans in business, promote American superiority in the world by telling everyone what a badass they are for getting into Harvard, and have been indoctrinated on American values which they then seed into whatever population they are returning to. This is one of America’s effective long term methods of world domination in action and it would be stupid to halt it.

And then make up some fake examples of it paying off big time.

For just $1 billion down payment, I will build it in 2 years for half of that. I pinky promise.

Pedestrians have the right of way. Most of the other hills are survivable.

I don’t know, but I started realizing that nearly all of the holiday traditions I’d ever participated in originated by way of some well received piece of advertising. It’s all a mess. It’s all people lying to each other for power, influence, and resources back to the very beginning. The internet certainly allows for messages to travel and build to critical mass faster, but humanity and this behavior originated together, only the tools change.

My terrible idea is that the world move to an 8 day week. Everyone works (at most) 4 days on, 4 days off. School is 4 on, 4 off. Two alternating shifts. Its always the weekend for half of everyone and everything is always open. I guarantee a roomful of smart people will be able to tear this idea to shreds. We could invent cool new names for all the days of the week though.

True, being homeless looks exhausting.

Someone more eloquent and knowledgeable then me made an argument about how the ‘no taxes on tips’ was going to be step one and then ‘no limits’ on tips would be step two which would lead to some unholy abomination of tax evasion for the already insanely rich. I don’t remember where I saw that, though.