What is this place? How do I get back to my AOL?

China should just replicate Taiwan somewhere like they replicate Paris, Venice, etc. and call it a day.

Keeping properties in good livable shape is literally a job. The money goes to many tradesmen that fixes many things. It takes time to manage it. Even if its not a 9-5, it still takes time. What is the logic behind if its 9-5, it is evil, and if its not 9-5 (how about 12pm-2pm?) it is not?

We started out with a small house. But when my family grew, we decided to move to a bigger house and rent out our small home to generate some income. Our goal is to eventually move back into the small home when we no longer need the space of our big home.

Our tenants so far have been people from out of town that needed a place temporarily before they commit to buying a home. We are on our 4th set of family/tenants now. Every family have successfully moved out and purchased a home after renting from us, usually 1 or 2 years. Its a stepping stone for people. Without landlords and places to rent, as you said, it would be prohibitively expensive for people to be mobile and to improve their lives (I mean, that’s the main reason people move around: new opportunities.) The anti-landlord crowd doesn’t understand this, and those type of posts are ridiculous.

When someone live in a home, there are wear and tear on the home. When we first moved out, we spent a good chunk of money to renovate our old home to make it nice, presentable, and livable. A place that is desirable to live in. Then we continuously maintain the landscape, and fix anything that broke. Because one day we are planning to move back in, so we going to keep it in as best shape as possible. So charging a high enough rent to cover the costs and a bit more to make the time worthwhile is totally reasonable.

I was a renter once. It is the same situation for myself when I moved to this city. New job, new opportunity. I rented an apartment, saved up money, and then made a purchase a few years later. Among my friends, there’s always a discussion of rent vs. buy. Some of my friends believed that they could save and invest and earn more money by never owning a home. I think if you do it right, it will work out either way. I am on the buy camp and it worked out. He was in the rent camp, and it also worked out for him. He is single and doesn’t need a lot of space. And he is extremely mobile, and is able to move to another city for a grad degree and a new job in a very short notice. Without a place to rent, it makes it very difficult for people to do that.

Such a weird hill to die on for Apple. How much does it really cost to just add 8GB more RAM? $5?

I remember seeing BYD in China back in the early 2000s with a logo that looks very similar to BMW’s logo. I guess they have to start somewhere by copying somebody. There were also a lot of cars that had fake badges (added by the owner, not the manufacturer) in China, there was a strong desire for the western brands, of course, that’s why Buicks and Audis were so popular in China. I guess I would stay away from that brand until it has proven itself somewhere else from China. Don’t trust any stats published out of China.

Podcasts are just mp3s (or whatever other audio format like ogg). Authors/pod casters should just host them on their site and be done with it. Why let some other company take a lion share of your ad profit. We need less centralized services and more distributed services. Use lemmy or mastodon to promote them. :)

There are two types of Christians.

1. The fake ones. Ultra-conservative. Personal responsibility blah blah blah.
2. The real ones. Saved by grace, not by works. These are very rare. Some churches do not have a single one.

I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don’t really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya’ll visiting that doesn’t work on FF?

Inflation is like acceleration. Acceleration going down means you are still speeding up, just at a lower rate. For prices to go down, we need DEFLATION!

The male safe space? :-)

That’s an incredible collection of homework!