What do you mean no choice? There’s always a choice.

Realistically many people don’t have a choice to buy, because they don’t have the credit score, reliable income, or down payment, but I don’t see why that blame falls on landlords and not on the banks or the government?

I’d be willing to bet you bought at least a few years ago, and probably couldn’t afford the house you’re in now if you had to buy it today. I’m in a similar spot. It definitely feels wrong. The rapid increase in prices in the housing market in the past few years is ridiculous. I think it’s a lot more complicated than “landlords” though. I think a lot of the issue stems from restrictive zoning that prevents the construction of small homes in dense neighborhoods. A lack of respect for trade jobs also contributes, with massive shortages of skilled construction workers driving prices up.

Granted, I live in a relatively affordable smaller city. If I were in a city with a lot of real estate speculation like LA or Toronto I might feel differently. But speculators aren’t landlords. I have a much bigger beef with a speculator who let’s a house sit empty than a landlord renting out apartments.

Landlords take on risk. For example, when I rented an apartment, I came home one day to a plumbing disaster. I called emergency maintenance and left. The landlord fixed it and paid for my hotel in the meantime. As a home owner now, that would be entirely on me to figure out. I’m pretty handy, but I have no disrespect for someone who doesn’t want to be responsible for that.

More importantly, selling a house costs about 10% of the value of the house, and the first few years of a mortgage you’re mostly paying interest. If you move every 3 years, it’s actually cheaper to rent than to buy. It’s just that your money is going to a landlord instead of to banks and realtors.

So while I see your argument that landlords don’t “deserve” the money they make, practically they’re an important part of the housing market, and I respect people who make an informed decision to rent.

They could be, and probably should be repurposed

But also, brand new chrome books are ~$80

By the time you collect, clean, repair, and reimage the older computers, it may well be cheaper to just buy Chromebooks.

I hate seeing anything useful going to the trash but the economics aren’t great in this case

You know that’s not actually going to happen though. Maybe one in a hundred will get intercepted and saved at best.

I think there’s some ability to distinguish as anything intentionally discarded due to spillage or damage should be accounted for directly, as opposed to only showing up at inventory

Obviously it is impossible to separate out honest mistakes, intentional theft, and disgruntled employee semi-intentional shrink. If you ask the company, 500% of shrink is theft by organized crime rings and the general public should definitely be spending taxpayer dollars on police enforcement and jail time for pretty thieves. So I would assume most of it is actually accidental check out mistakes and employees “accidentally” checking things out wrong.

Indeed. It would be interesting to run the same analysis for censorship of pro Israel content and compare the differences between the two, though the data would likely still be noisy and inconclusive.

The baking soda will just neutralize the vinegar though? And you’ll get salt water? Vinegar is good at getting smells out though.

Blame the great vowel shift.

But also, English spelling can’t standardize because English pronunciation isn’t standard. West Coast vs Midwest vs South vs East Coast have vastly different accents. Any spelling reform that makes English phonetic for one would be wrong for the others.

And it keeps changing! People keep moving and interacting with other languages, adding and dropping words and accents over time.

The worst is when the banner is unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but nothing on the site is clickable until you interact with it

There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I’m not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that’s still a disruptive environment.

It’s good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it’s so incredibly safe is because it’s highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The question isn’t “are nuclear plants perfectly safe”, the question is “will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce.”

I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.

Wind and solar are great but there’s still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn’t mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.

Almost anything has the potential to negatively affect tens of thousands of people when it’s managed as recklessly and negligently as Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was less a reactor and more a bomb with a very long fuse. Saying we shouldn’t build nuclear reactors today is like saying you shouldn’t take a modern cruise because 14th century sailing ships sank all the time.

Obviously building one wind turbine is less disruptive, but you need hundreds to get the same output, and they only work when it’s windy.

Those wind turbines and solar panels also get constructed, and affect a much larger area. It’s not an obvious comparison

And a dam failure isn’t that much better than a nuclear accident, and far more common and less regulated

That list records 8 fatalities related to nuclear power in the US. All time.

Coal is responsible for more than 40. Per year. Just in my city.