The Matrix had it right.

1999, turn of the millenium.

Zenith of human society, all downhill from there.

If that doesn’t work, get John Constantine.

May the spirit of St. Mangione soon visit Mr. Vance and impart upon him his Saintly honesty.

As is written:

Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.

Luigi 1:7

I mean, technically, kind of, yes, in the sense of … bringing a hand grenade to an arm wrestling match… does ensure your opponent … won’t win…

What’s the old LBJ line?

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Uh pretty much yep, just insert any sufficiently maligned minority group in the place of black americans, and this still holds up as a fundamental principle of American politics, 60ish years later.

Its pronounced ‘About four thirds megabytes.’

… Even assuming the self driving tech was actually capable of doing this, which is won’t be…

How would this even make any sense?

Ok, if you live within about 200 to 300 miles of a Tesla factory, … you have this option?

Fremont, California; Sparks, Nevada; Austin, Texas; Buffalo, New York; Lathrop, California.

Outside of 250 miles ish of one of those places? No self driving delivery for you.

… And I am pretty surr not all models are made at all those locations.

Despite long ago claiming his EVs and charger network would be capable of automatically recharging or battery swapping themselves… to make a long distance journey… that … doesn’t exist, he abandoned all of that.

Even funnier: Imagine a tesla self driving from the as of yet to be completed gigafactory in Monterrey Mexico… through the border checkpoint.

The auto charger network doesn’t exist, the car would murder people, cause an accident or fucking explode in the border queue… and even if none of that happened… how in the fuck is a self driving car gonna get through a militarized border crossing?

If he just gives himself a waiver via DOGE for his cars… congrats Elon, you are now a drug trafficker / arms smuggler, whether you know it or not.

… fucking lunacy.

I absolutely despise the patronizing and bellittling nature of that phrase, and the tone it is usually delivered in…

… But at the same time… cleaning as you cook a complex meal with multiple steps and lots of involved cookware… really really does cut down on overall time spent in the kitchen, and makes for an actually usable and sanitary kitchen.

Worst case scenario, you’ve got everything but the final used cookware soapily soaking in the sink when you serve and eat… and then right after you eat, you rinse and dry those off, and then clean the final stage cookware and serving plates/utensils.

If you don’t have the time or energy to handle cooking and cleaning a complex meal… you don’t have the time and energy to just cook it, and then be overwhelmed later by the accumulation of ‘dish cleaning debt’.

…

It can be somewhat challenging to learn how to cook and clean at the same time, and avoid getting soap into your food or visa versa… but it is by no means impossible, and is a huge time saver… and you can feel proud of yourself for legitimately learning an extremely useful life skill.

If you just set a rule for yourself or your apartment or house that … there should basically never be any dishes left in the sink for over an hour… you avoid the massive pile up of dishes and always being overwhelmed and avoiding them… because your rule basically enforces breaking things down into cleaning smaller amounts of dishes at a time, and it also forces the generally positive experience of cooking and eating to be integrated with the generally negative experience of cleaning dishes.

…

I have, waaaay too many times, lived with people who just pile up dishes somehow in the sink and dishwasher, such that it becomes an actual biohazard (I mean it, rotting food and mold, swarms of flies in a sink that hasn’t been cleaned in two weeks or more, nobody can even remember if the dishes in the dishwasher are all clean, all dirty, or a mix of both)…

…and that means if you wanna cook anything with a commonly used piece of cookware, ok, now you gotta pull it out of the ratsnest in the sink, hope nobody threw any knives in there to cut your hands on, and get an infection from the festering biohazard… and then also you must now somehow clean this cookware while the sink is completely full.

Which means you have to just clean the entire sink to begin to be able to clean the major cookware you need to begin to cook the food.

…

Hell, the solution that ended up working best for me was to just also throw on a ‘no dishwasher’ rule.

Force yourself to associate the actual cleaning cost with whatever you are cooking… and the result was that I ended up with a mental health affirming regular structured rule/habit, that I actually ended up genuienly enjoying, as another source of ‘i actually accomplished something today’… as well as basically ingraining a better subconscious ability to understand what level of cooking complexity I actually had the energy to prepare.

If you find yourself being often overwhelmed by what you want to make… learn to make simpler recipes, get a rice cooker or crockpot and just have basically a constant supply of something approximating a stew, get an airfryer or toaster oven for rapidly heating up smaller portions, salads are great for you and often have a pretty low prep time.

Save the dishwasher for actual schedule emergencies and hosting an occasional get together or party.

…

Basically, treat dishes as credit card debt.

Pay that shit off ASAP, otherwise, it’ll snowball into disaster.

Remove the ‘i can handle the dishes/pay this off later’ from your mental approach to it, directly associate all the costs together in a very near time frame.

…

tldr; that saying needs a makeover or rebrand.

Maybe:

Clean as you go, dish pile don’t grow.

something like that? I am not really a … sloganeer.

If the 4chan posts that are purported to be Elon… actually are…

His latest persona is literally the AntiChrist.

… Normally a person like that ends up in an involuntary hold in a psych ward.

… Yeah…

Ironically, the last job I had… before becoming homeless…

Was the Co-Lead of the Data Team… for Mary’s Place, the largest non profit network of shelters and other programs … assisting the homeless… in and near Seattle.

About 24hrs after the assault that crippled me, I dragged myself into the main office… for a sandwich.

They handed me my papers on the spot.

I told the HR guy to go fuck himself, as he was crying.

… Fuck Seattle, at this point.

They are almost certainly still using my databases, my online, public facing intake forms, my process flows and documentation…

Anyway, I was literally the expert on exactly how fucked I was, as a single white cis male, in terms of getting housing or shelter assistance in Seattle.

We shared at least shelter capacity and eligibility info with almost every other shelter in or near Seattle… and almost all of them prioritize families, minorities and/or female domestic abuse victims.

Made more sense to head pretty far east to lower CoL areas and stay in roach motels than to drag my crippled ass around trying to find a working path to housing, given how often I was being mugged, assaulted, held hostage by a psychotic fentanyl addict for a week at one point, missed being shot in a drive by by about 100 feet at one point…

Anyway, all our the widely publicized PIT headcounts of homeless people in any given city or nationwide… basically need to be multiplied by about 4 or 5. So that’d be about 3 to 4 million, not the almost 800k of the last nationwide PIT count.

If you compare the demographics of living situations people are in who requested our help… to the demographics of who actually gets counted by those PIT count methodologies…

Yeah, you need to multiply the PIT count by roughly 4 or 5 to make it actually representative of all the people who are requesting help, but are not counted by the PIT.

… And that will easily balloon up to 10, 20+ million … fuck, probably within a year from right now given how utterly fucked the economy is about to become, and how many governement assistsnce programs are getting cut.

…

But uh, back to things I can now just laugh at…

yeah, Boeing is fucked. They were fucked before the tariffs, and now they are turbofucked, and all the right wing anti union asshats that work for them will just retreat further into delusion and a sense of enraged, denied entitlement as they all get exactly what their AM talk show radio hosts have told them they want for 30+ years.

… and of course who can forget about the liberal tinged, smug, self serving, fake ass corpo tech shitheels who all don’t realize they’re basically dressed down Patrick Batemans because they go to Pride marches… yeah, a whole lot of them are fucked as well as they get laid off, their 2nd and 3rd homes can’t generate AirBnB rents anymore…

Oh no, who could have forseen that working for giant tech megacorps that have explicitly stated they want to automate everything for 20 years… are now automating their own jobs, and that they are not actually special?

…

I dunno if I qualify as a rags to riches tale…

I got maybe halfway through that article before I had to stop.

… Too similar to what I went through, too … way too similar. Its not just that basically no one gives a fuck about it, its that almost everyone assumes the absolute worst about you, all the time, unless you ‘perform’ perfectly for them.

I was recently diagnosed with PTSD. I actually cannot handle reliving, or apparently even reading about those experiences.

They fill me with rage and terror.

Make me double check and make sure my knife is in the spot it ‘lives in’ in my motel room.

…

The teeth thing is real. Somehow I have been insanely lucky with baffling infection resitant teeth… I have never had a cavity in my entire life, despite literally being homeless for over a year.

But I’ve seen the immense agony of other homeless people with bad teeth. Seen people bite into a sandwich and 2 1/2 broken teeth come out in bits…

… Seen people with fucking gangrene, massively infected feet and other wounds…

… For a while I was able to trade my rudimentary first aid skills for respect, cigarettes and food, became kind of a defacto medic at some encampments and shelters I ended up at.

Seen people OD and die in front of me, stumbled upon the bodies in the back alleys, either OD’d or beaten or stabbed or shot to death.

… I can’t believe I survived it. I can’t make sense of why I did.

… Just a skinny, out of shape, Autistic tech dork, streets should have eaten me alive.

… At least I was able to eventually get connected to Physical Therapy, and … not a very good one, but at least at newbie Social Worker.

Solid Snake may wanna go over the basics of CQC… I wanna go back over the basics of CBT.

Physical Therapist has me in aquatherapy. Too many torn and otherwise fucked up ligaments in too many places, have to have the bouyancy and water resistsnce to do any useful stretches without extreme pain.

… sorry. rambling. yay trauma.

Entirely seriously, I have been listening to many right wing Star Wars fans, since the 90s, make very serious arguments that the Empire were actually the good guys, that Agent Smith from the Matrix is actually a good guy just doing his job.

Also relevant to this: For a long while, Elon used JC Denton, the protagonist from Deus Ex, as his avatar on Twitter…

Somefuckinghow, entirely not realizing that he bears much, much more similarity to the main villain of Deus Ex, the uberwealthy deepstate oligarch Bob Page … who … concocts a false reality, regarding a pandemic, to mask the fact that he is covertly meeting with and buying influence of other prominent business people and politicians… all while also heavily investing in advancing AI tech, which he wants to proliferate everywhere.

Like 15 years ago, Elon was a major AI skeptic, considering its development potentially extremely dangerous.

Then he realized he could make money if he got AI (self driving cars) working, and just did a fucking 180.

Oh right Bob Page also pour gabillions of dollars into genetic research to grow the perfect super soldiers (JC and Paul Denton)… meanwhile Elon has … basically an artificial insemination/breeding kink that also almost certainly involves some kind of artificial genetic selection or manipulation during pregnancy, as … waaay too many of his kids come out AMAB compared to what you’d expect from the baseline of not doing that.

I have said this before: If you were to ask Elon to summarize his life story, he would tell you his whole life is basically a gigantic ‘revenge of the nerd’ plot.

He is the uber-incel.

I do genuienly believe he has Aspbergers (so now we’d say he is on the ASD spectrum) given how … just astoundingly socially awkward he is, goes ham into his hyperfixations (with billions and billions of dollars), is really, really bad at understanding and regulating his own emotions…

I am autistic as well and he is like me at 14 years old, just never actually grew up in terms of taking the time and therapy/counseling to learn how to interface better with neurotypical social norms, understand and accept yourself and how you are different…

Instead, he just wants people to think he’s cool, because he never fundamentally learned that… you gotta accept and love and define yourself first man, worry about what other people think about you second, you don’t and shouldn’t need to be loved or worshipped by everyone … you should be able to validate yourself.

On that level, it is so fucking sad and pathetic.

Reminds me of the line from a Metric song: All the gold and the guns in the world couldn’t get you off.

On another level: This man is a comic book supervillain evil CEO, and needs to be fucking put down or locked away before he just actually kills millions of people, either basically directly, or through astounding incompetence.

Am a fairly straight presenting dude, probably would not wear unless doing a costume or some such…

But if I was a chick, or had an occasion to dress as one, or suggest a dress to one…

… Well basically, the problem is that these seem to be … extremely ornate, western themed … sandals, as they don’t actually fully cover the foot, but are instead multiple wide strips.

But if these were just similarly styled, low rise, heeled, true boots, I feel you could work these into anything from basically a sort of business formal dress atire, to a stablehand/bounty huntress sort of look.

Like uh:

This is a character from Trigun (the movie).

So with these boots, which have sort of a velvetish crimson and light brown / tan color pattern… maybe switch the pants to a moderate gray, boot cut, with either socks or leggings under them, a dsrker gary…

… go for a full, tucked shirt with that barely-salmon-almost-just-white color, maybe a not too busy, fairly muted paisley or plaid or pinstripe pattern , throw a navy to deep navg colored vest over that (either the vest or the shirt is patterned, never both)…

…pretty much keep the overcoat, change the gloves to match the color pattern of the boots (maybe that crimson velvet on the palms and inside of the fingers, tan leather on the back side of the hand… but the tan of the leather part of the gloves matches the color of the shoulder pad/pattern of the overcoat, not the main lighter color.

And i guess also go with a similarly crimson hair color, or maybe a natural hair color with crimson tips or highlights or something.

Something like that?

Sorry, haven’t had a chance to go to a convention or cosplay event with a significant other in a while.

Ah, my west side bias is showing, oops.

I’ve travelled over the Cascades many times, but only really spent basically vacations or weekend trips actually out in Spokane or the Tri Cities.

Tacoma is where a bunch of the hipsters I knew went in the early to mid 2010s… but now it has largely … gentrified, and also crime and drug addiction and homelessness is now much more visible.

After I got assaulted, I ended up homeless untill the SSDI kicked in, a good part of that in Tacoma, and jesus fucking christ fentanyl addicts are basically fucking zombies, nearly got killed by a few.

But yeah, basically all of WA is just… way way way too fucking expensive to live in, unless you, individually, make at least 6 figures… and the job market for getting that kind of job is pulling in candidates from literally the entire world, competition is insane, nepotism abounds, basically all tech work treats you like or literally as a contract worker unless you have massive connections or got grandfathered in a decade or more ago.

Also Boeing is definitely gonna get fucking wrecked from retaliatory tariffs… there was already a story in the last 24 hours of a Chinese airline returning a recently delivered 737 Max because the Chinese ret. tariffs applied to it.

Just fucking flew it back to Boeing Field even after their local plant in China had just finished putting the Chinese airline’s livery on it, fuck it, nope, return it, too expensive.

It doesn’t matter how progressive WA is generally… untill it gets a state income tax, it’ll be a playground for corpos and rainbow capitalism.

My current plan is to … well, hope to god that my SSDI doesn’t get massively curtailed or cancelled, keep doing physical therapy and living off of soup and trail mix untill I’ve built up some savings (all my fucking cards got stolen, years later i am still trying to convince all the credit agencies that I am me and 90% of the rung up CC debt was not me)… and then move on up to Minnesota.

Minneapolis/St.Paul is roughly the same population as … the actual population that lives in Seattle, and just generally, way more affordable, not as solid blue, but decently so… and the risks from accelerating climate change are actually significantly lower than most of WA.

They’ve got more effective state based rental … basically tax relief for low income people, you get a subsidy each tax year cycle that offsets some of your rental costs, SNAP (if it still exists) will go further…

… and their apartments actually have heating and AC, unlike a large chunk of PNW apartments… that fucking heat dome a few years back nearly killed me.

3 days, 72 hours straight of no less than 90 degrees indoors, up to 105, even with space blankets and then blackout curtains to try to keep the sun out… had to just keep taking cold showers… and I still ended up sweating out nearly 10 pounds.

Anyway, if I can get to the point I am not in constant pain, I am just gonna try my hand at making my own videogame, solo.

If it works out as a decent revenue stream, hurray! If not? Don’t really care, I got absolutely chewed up and abused by the corpo data analyst jobs I worked, I’d rather firebomb their offices than go back to a similar job, I would literally rather be impoverished and at least mentally sound than have to deal with the hyper gaslighting corpo tech culture anymore.

Going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing you are describing either Bellingham or Everett (or their sort of… basically attached, suburb cities)… in which case, my condolences, I’ve lived in both rofl.

I hear Tacoma finally stopped smelling like farts all the time somewhat recently…

But yeah, all the ‘medium sized’ PNW cities are absurdly overpriced now.

I ended up getting assaulted and seriously injurrd… and am living off of SSDI while recovering… many states away, where a person can actually rent a place off of disability alone.

Its not me doing the wishing or future predicting here.

It is Zillow.

They have the largest, most comprehensive, and most frequently updated database of information on US home prices… basically, in existence.

They are saying you are wrong.

Not me.

Worth noting that the -1.7% figure is … nationwide, amalgamated.

There will be areas that keep appreciating, areas that stay flat… but many, many more areas that will depreciate.

“DEUS VULT”

… all in a day’s work for the AntiChrist JD Vance.

Jesus fuck it broke through 38k when I was taking a piss, oh boy…

Glad you agree!

=)

Also I just realized we both assumed Libra is a he.

Whoops!

Hopefully he doesn’t drive up inflation so much that it cancels out the 15-40% drops we’ll see in home prices.

Well uh… unfortunately:

So thats about an 11% devaluation of the dollar since start of the year, where the dxy is an index based on the volume of currencies exhanged for the USD.

And uh… yeah, we … actually still need to import a lot of shit… so… uh…that line looks pretty steep down, not done sinking yet…

Fucking, who knows?

Oops, God Emperor Trump turned out to be a false Messiah, and is actually somehow a thrall of all the Chaos Gods simultaneously.

He probably meant that it almost never goes down in nominal, ie, non inflation adjusted terms, yoy.

What you have posted is:

1. Not actual nominal prices, it is the case-schiller index, which is calculated with different weighting and methods than Zillow is using.

2. This is inflation adjusted, real values, again, not nominal prices.

3. Looks like this is a data point at each month, when we are talking about blocking out and aggregating entire years and representing them as one data point.

When looking at more granular data, you’re more likely to see more movement. When you’re looking at less granular data… a projected yoy decline is a much bigger deal.

Thats a lot of words to say: You are not doing an apples to apples comparison.

That would look like this:

Apologies for whipping up this shit tier graph from FRED, im on a shitty phone.

Orange or Rust is actual nominal prices, blocked out year by year.

Blue is the nominal change in yearly prices, I would have liked to made it a centered % change graph in the middle, but FRED doesnt do that in its web renderer.

But you can still see any time the blue is… below zero.

And that is, historically, pretty rare, only happening in 7 (or 8?) years of nearly a century of data.

Except it is unexpected, if you ask basically 90% of realtors, and the vast majority of analysts following the housing market, untill… well basically right now.

The whole schtick is that houses prices always go up, never down, that price growth may slow but never actually go negative.

I pointed this out to my other reply to you, but uh yeah, the fundamentals have been blaring more and more warning signs for years, but perception is key, so the vast majority of people who report market projections are incentivized to paint a far too rosy picture…

… And then reality becomes too difficult to ignore, and perceptions shift rapidly.

Zillow, a month ago, was projecting a modest, nationwide growth of 0.8%.

Now, a month later, Trump actually does the stuff he repeatedly said he was going to do, but the market just assumed he was either bullshitting or had a more robust and thought out plan…

And suddenly the delusions are eviscerated, and a month later, 0.8% gets moved downward -2.5% to a -1.7% projection.

These people did not see this coming until it smacked them in the face.

Almost no one was projecting an actual decline, publically, untill very recently, and if you were projecting a decline 6 months ago, you would have either been dismissed or laughed at by the experts.