...and if you had actually seen our ballot for this primary, you'd know that anyone with a semblance of care to know who they were voting for and why constituted veritable weeks of legwork. The governor's race had like 60 people running, not to mention all the judge seats, etc.

You mail in your credit card payments? My bullshit detector is absolutely pegged right now.

As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no.

Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

I'll pick a bone on the flavor comment because a good Washington Navel is probably one of the best tasting oranges in existence.

I guess it might depend on the variety then. I've had navel oranges that were almost like damp cellulose to eat. Very little juice or flavor.

You got a bad/dry one. Happens all the time with home grown and less frequently with commercial products. My backyard trees have improved, but only with fairly intensive upkeep.

The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.

It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.

It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.

I see it's still the season of perpetual hope wherever you are...

Yeah, but there's nothing like some sweet, sweet justification.

The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".

And over the decades there have been many more pro-renting pieces like this in the general press than pro-home ownership. I’ve assumed the pieces are bankrolled by the investment community, because investment bankers can’t make money off of your money if your money is locked up in a home.

“Rent your apartment, save the difference, invest it in the financial casino of your choice and maybe you’ll win big this time.” Or maybe not. But the house (investment brokers) always win.

this is one of those where sheer facts and numbers can be interpreted either way and more so (in my opinion) than most other “arguments” it is almost impossible to change someone’s opinion once it formed.

I once spent 1/2 my Sunday trying to convince my best friend that he would have financially been better off if he rented (he paid off his house which he can sell today for $2,000,000) - I came with receipts (pun intended) showing how he would have been significantly better off if he rented and invested in the market but to no avail :)

Someone must have a wild-ass theorem about whether or not consciousness is representable as some distribution over possible realities. But yeah, I agree this feels like taking a huge step towards fewer and fewer people having agency in their own (real) lives.

I'm certain Big [insert industry] will gobble this kind of thing up.