“Free Tomatoes, Take One!”

Unethical

That sucks.
I don’t know if this is a thing anymore but “back in my day” your friends/family/coworkers/roommates would try to hook you up with other people that they know are single and might be a good match. Especially the older ladies in your life, that was like their mission in life. Aside from that, you might ask someone who runs in overlapping circles that you’ve seen a few times if they want to get coffee or lunch.

The closest thing to Tinder-type dating would have been “cruising” on a Friday and Saturday night, driving up and down the Main Street of your town, hanging out in parking lots to talk and make plans for the night. Even then, you would ask “where do/did you go to school” and “do you know ____” “are you related to” type questions to establish your “degrees of Kevin Bacon” relationship in the social network.

So there was no need to date total strangers. That would be considered kinda weird and suspicious, which is why online dating was heavily stigmatized in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. I went on a few match.com and eharmony dates but kept it secret, telling only my closest friends, out of shame. They thought I was crazy, meeting up with strangers like that.

A few horny guys would try to chat up every random stranger and it occasionally paid off for them, but that wasn’t really normal behavior.

I think we’re all more mobile now, moving from city to city for work, so those networks are probably shattered for most people.

I feel so incredibly lucky that I dodged the dating app bullet, it seems awful for guys to try and compete in that space. And for women, having creepy dudes be creepy with no repercussions, with no way to tell their mother/aunt/sister to smack some sense into them… not great.

1. There are plenty of tiny coffee places (and other small businesses) near me where the owner is there all day, every day with just one or two employees. You’ll get to know them if you want to. You might also bump into them around town. If they suck, patronize a different place.

2. Theoretically, most of the money that I spend there stays in town, helping to keep other businesses and families going. They probably sponsor the local animal shelter or little league team. I like that.

3. I’ve worked in small businesses and corporate America. In my experience corporate America always sucks, small business only sometimes suck. I don’t like supporting large corporations and especially not their admin and C-suite. Those vampires are why the wealth gap is growing so quickly.

4. Corporate food is boring.

5. Some people argue that all of the transportation involved in moving around product and people for multi-national corporations is worse for the environment. I don’t care about that personally but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.

Aright then, how about for a ladder? Do you want to drive a box truck or trailer around to hold one ladder and painting supplies or whatever?

In the US, all metal tubes/pipes/stock for metal-working related tasks (welding, plumbing, structural stuff) comes in 20ft sections. The three options that I know of for transporting them are: trailer, box truck or roof rack.
A 22foot truck with roof rack would be perfect for someone who works with metal e.g. a plumber. A smaller truck would work but then you’ve got a bunch of pipes hanging off like you’re in a jousting tournament.

Sorry to repost my reply from another thread, I hate to spam up the post but I feel like every American should know about the Minstrel Show

It wasn’t just a form of comedy, it was an entire entertainment industry all on its own, like movie theaters or concerts today. It eventually got replaced by/morphed into Vaudeville (still with blackface/black clowns) which was then replaced by cinema.

For a good 50-100 years, a major form of entertainment (not just in the South btw) was pretty much just: “haha black people are such stupid clowns! Look, that one thinks he’s fancy! That one’s a no-good drunk! Oh look, that one’s trying to give a speech!” It was pretty formulaic with standard props, just like you’d expect to see at a clown show. So fried chicken and watermelon were standard props like “tiny car full of clowns”, oversized shoes, a flower pot for a hat, a flower that squirts water, etc. For that reason they carry a very unpleasant legacy that reminds people of an insult to injury that still hasn’t been made right, in my opinion.

The format was pretty similar to the show Hee-Haw actually, kind of a fun variety show, just wildly racist and it’s obviously pretty fucked up to pick on literal slaves. Real bitch move there.

So people who know something about history are pretty salty about that and forms of the Minstrel Show were still happening here and there recently enough that people alive today remember seeing them.

Irish people caught some shit, but not like that. I’m not sure if Irish-American racism like that happened recently enough that living people remember it, or that it was ever to the extent that it formed an entire entertainment industry.

I agree with everything you said but I’d also like to point out that it wasn’t just a form of comedy, it was an entire entertainment industry all on its own, like movie theaters or concerts today. It was called the Minstrel Show

It eventually got replaced by/morphed into Vaudeville which was then replaced by cinema.

For a good 50-100 years, a major form of entertainment (not just in the South btw) was pretty much just: “haha black people are such stupid clowns! Look, that one thinks he’s fancy! That one’s a no-good drunk! Oh look, that one’s trying to give a speech!” It was pretty formulaic with standard props, just like you’d expect to see at a clown show. So fried chicken and watermelon were standard props like “tiny car full of clowns”, oversized shoes, a flower pot for a hat, a flower that squirts water, etc. For that reason they carry a very unpleasant legacy that reminds people of an insult to injury that still hasn’t been made right, in my opinion.

The format was pretty similar to the show Hee-Haw actually, kind of a fun variety show, just wildly racist and it’s obviously pretty fucked up to pick on literal slaves. Real bitch move there.

So people who know something about history are pretty salty about that and forms of the Minstrel Show were still happening here and there recently enough that people alive today remember seeing them.

Irish people caught some shit, but not like that. I’m not sure if Irish-American racism like that happened recently enough that living people remember it, or that it was ever to the extent that it formed an entire entertainment industry.

I stand corrected!

Ruby is just one guy, Vermin Supreme

You’ll be fine. The average Texan isn’t even aware of this stupid shit and the cities you listed are way more left-leaning than a small town in whatever state you’re from.

This is a few hundred idiots in a state with a population of 30 million people. I saw more people at Costco yesterday.

Some articles have misrepresented it as 1,000 people, but that was a concert in Dripping Springs, a small town outside of Austin (not the border) with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin. 1,000 people turning out for a musician with Top 40 hits is actually a very poor turnout for being near a city with 1,000,000 people.

This is all just media hype. Edit to add: And politician hype. I’m not sure which one I’m angrier at. They both suck for trying to “make fetch happen.”

So no rental properties at all? You either buy or you’re homeless? That doesn’t sound great to me. Owning is a lot of work, risk and commitment. If anything goes wrong, you better have thousands of dollars ready to dump into getting your roof fixed or your plumbing fixed or whatever. If you decide you want to go to a different school or accept a better job offer in another city, you’re probably gonna lose tens of thousands of dollars to the real estate agents when you sell. It’s not the right choice for a lot of people.

I’ve lived mostly in houses owned by landlords with less than ten properties and they were all pretty cool for the most part. Way better landlords than apartment complexes or property management companies. The biggest annoyance was surprise visits by them early on the weekend to plant flowers/bushes in the front yard, water the tree, replace edging, typical homeowner crap like that. I guess worse than that, a couple of times their situation changed and they decided to move back into the house, so they didn’t renew our lease and we had to move out. That kinda sucked but it’s their house, if they want to live in it and your lease is up, that’s the way contracts go.

All that said, property management companies and large landlords can get fucked. Regardless of housing cost, they’ve always been scumbags to deal with.

“ When combining closings between both larger, private equity and smaller, independent operations, investors accounted for 44% of the purchases of flips during the third quarter”

That figure is talking about only flipped (i.e. remodeled) houses bought in a specific quarter, October 2022. Most people (myself included) can’t afford freshly remodeled homes and brand new cars.
That figure also lumps small landlords together with big investors which really isn’t the same thing in my opinion but some people around here think that all landlords are evil so that’s somewhat subjective I guess.

Institutional investors “purchased 25% of the homes flipped” “as soaring mortgage rates push traditional buyers to the sidelines,”

That still sucks but it’s not 44% of all homes being bought by big corporations throughout 2023.

Here’s a recent Business Insider article that goes in depth on who’s been buying houses over time

I agree with most of what you said but that 44% number is wildly wrong. Article about it
Also, anecdotally, I’ve gone through a couple of houses in hot markets the last 5 years (had to move for work) as both buyer and seller. The vast majority of people looking weren’t corporate or institutions. Most were couples looking for a place to live. Cash buyers above asking are a real thing though and they suuuuuuuck for the poors like myself.

It’s not even close to true. Here’s an article about it

I just wanted to mention that I got a chuckle out of the word “pallettable” because it’s not quite right but I totally see how you got there. I thought you might like to know that the word is “palatable.”
A palette is the board that a painter uses to hold paint, a pallet is something you pick up with a forklift and a palate is the roof of your mouth/your tasting skill. So something that’s pallettable sounds like something tasty that you’d smear all over a giant board and forklift onto a truck.
Fucking English, lol