Hmm…. I’ve never heard about those kinds of limits here. It’s not too uncommon for 3-5 people to split a house(which may or may not actually have 3-5 legal bedrooms) around here, though the trend seems to be splitting those houses into 2-3 legal suites, each of which might have multiple bedrooms.

I don’t think a medallion system is a solution though, as I understand that was brought in to artificially lower supply and increase revenue for the cab companies by limiting the number available. I do like the idea of more proactive enforcement of regulations to ensure that housing is kept in reasonable repair, but that can also increase prices since I’d venture most people put up with poor quality rentals due to them being the lowest cost; at least in terms of rent, though utility costs can outweigh that. If there was safe, clean, and affordable housing available then people trying to market sub-standard units wouldn’t get renters and would be forced to either upgrade the unit or sell.

The other thing I didn’t think of is renting makes it a lot simpler to share accommodations. A group of 2-4 people can split the rent on a property that none of them would qualify for individually.

Agreed that the current situation parallels a lot of industries in that it’s concentrating wealth in the hands of those that are already ahead and it’s difficult for new people to become part of that system. Personally, I think the solution for any of these essential goods/services is crown corporations, which creates a standard of service that private industry has to compete with instead of being able to collude to maximize margins.

I’ve heard that the regulatory environment had a big impact on some places. Something like there were a bunch of subsidies/incentives to invest in the real estate aspect of malls. When those incentives dried up, the increased operating costs got passed on to tenants, some of which couldn’t afford the increase. Closing shops make the mall less attractive for customers, which reduces sales at the remaining shops, some of which end up closing down, and the whole thing spirals into the situation we have now.

Not for everybody, but I’ve heard reasonable advice of getting the mortgage at a longer amortization period, then making extra payments. When I was looking it was typical to be allowed to increase the payment by 10-20% or to make additional payments up to 10-20% of the initial loan amount each year without penalty. That’s enough to potentially be paying it off in under 10 years without penalty(which is often in the range of 3 months simple interest, so still worthwhile if you unexpectedly come in to some money), but also gives you the flexibility of going back to the minimum payments if your financial situation changes.

Renting does make it cheaper/simpler to change accommodations though. Think things like starting a family and wanting to scale the household up from just two people to adding children and down again when those children move out. Renting makes it simpler to move closer to work, public transportation, schools, Etc. as a persons needs change. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of financial benefits to living in your own home: grants/rebates available for homeowners, not rental properties, being able to save costs by doing your own maintenance/renovations, etc…

I’ve had a few different First Aid courses and the instructors all have slightly different reasoning. One argument for compression only is potential for passing disease mouth to mouth, the newer courses tend to teach this because sometimes people that don’t feel comfortable doing rescue breaths will fail to do CPR at all. Another is that in cases where you’ve witnessed the event, the blood is already fairly well oxygenated and if medical help has a good response time the benefits of breaths are minimal. The first is more about compression only CPR being better than nothing, breaths are still advised where the rescuer feels comfortable doing so. The second is pretty situational.

This is entirely regional though. The further you are from the equator, the more seasonal variation there is in sunlight levels, and heating/cooling loads. Around here our solar production is minimized during the season when our energy needs are maximized. We also don’t have variable rate billing, though we only get partial credit for excess generation, so battery storage will never pay for itself until something changes.

My utility gives a 50% credit on excess generation. Thing there is the utility is still the one taking responsibility for having the capacity and scalability to respond to variation in demand and production. When I was getting quotes, adding storage would have doubled the cost of the system for a day or two worth of storage. Probably would cost double again to have a system that would keep up through the winter.

This is regional, some places don’t have reduced min wage for tipped employees. Servers make the same min wage as everybody else and earn tips on top of that.

My presumption is that the desalinated water might be cheaper than tap, but would still require further processing to be considered potable, which would raise the price on par or above conventionally sourced tap water. I imagine there’s a lot of costal areas though with ready access to saltwater and minimal access to freshwater where it’s worthwhile.

Lots of Canada’s laws are a little extreme to me, but they cover a lot that you said. Restricted firearms need an extra permit that requires personal references, and must be double locked(like a locked case in a locked safe, or trigger lock plus locked case) during storage and transportation, and we limit magazine sizes. Lots of our gun crime involves firearms purchased legally in the US that make their way here on the black market, so I’m in favour of the US tightening up their gun control.

There’s a few different things here that make clarity difficult. One is the precise definition of various techniques, for example:poaching water is not bubbling, simmering water is gentle bubbles, boiling water is bubbling heavily(some say “full rolling boil”, which is what boiling always is. Second is simply the name of the cooking vessel/equipment, griddle vs grill vs broiler, which is sometimes the same term used to describe the technique applied. You can grill a steak, but you wouldn’t say you ovened a roast. Last is that many terms are misused so much that it’s just become common parlance. Technically a grill is a device with grates and a radiant device that cooks food through a combination of conduction and radiation, usually powered by propane or natural gas. A BBQ is a similar object powered by wood, but it’s common for an outdoor grill to be referred to as a BBQ, though when used with the lid down is a little different than an open restaurant style grill since it acts a bit like an oven too.

Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

Be interesting to see exactly what the traffic patterns looked like. There’s the set of driving regulations that generally say we should make way for emergency vehicles, but not if it requires ignoring another regulation. For example, if you’re stopped at a red light and an emergency vehicle approaches from behind, law says you wait for the light to turn green, then proceed when safe. Real drivers will run that light, hop a curb, make an illegal u-turn, etc. to make space, and nobodies going to get ticket for that, but it they are technically still violations.

I also think the comparison shouldn’t necessarily be against a typical driver, but a novice one, who doesn’t always respond correctly to an uncommon situation.

Even in places where they have to use the actual ingredients, there’s a lot of tricks to making it look different in photos. That burger might only be partially cooked to reduce shrinkage, then the burger and bun are frozen so they hold shape for the photo. Vegetables carefully picked out and arranged, tomato/pickles blotted dry, and the sauce applied with an eye dropper to provide visual balance after the rest of the burger is stacked.

I will say from my experience, that tends to apply to advertising photography for large franchises. If we’re taking about food photography associated with a high profile event or restaurant where food is actually served, there’s minimal difference between the photo plate and what’s actually served. Sometimes the photo plate is just one picked out while producing the ones being served, sometimes it’s the first/last plate and a person takes a minute to pick out the best looking of ingredients from the same container that was used to serve the rest. Sometimes it’s just an extra minute arranging the plate nicely compared to the last 150 that were done quickly to keep up with service. Often the photographer then gets to eat the plate they’ve just photographed.

Maybe it’s just the people I know personally, but it seems like very few have gone through multiple marriages. Most seem to just skip the formal marriage thing the second time around, even if those relationships last much longer than the ones that lead to divorce.

True, but depending how far back you’re talking about, that could mean people that came of age before things like cable/satellite TV, internet, etc… Now I feel like as long as I’ve got the capacity to play video games, watch TV shows/movies, and access the web things can’t be too bad.

This is right. A proper system has a transfer switch that prevents back feeding the grid if it’s down. There’s also a safety aspect in that supplying power to the branch circuit in this way bypasses the overcurrent protection, so one could potentially be loading that circuit with 5 A on top of its rated load and cause significant damage.

If a person wants to offset their electricity at this small scale, better to have it powering a shed or charging power tool batteries. Won’t get as good a return, but you’d never get a return on a permitted grid tied system at that scale either.

Plus pets, home/vehicle ownership, commute times, etc… Lots of things that some people have/choose to commit a significant amount of time. Sometimes it’s also not about the total time commitment, but the windows of time available. Things like kids/pets can make it difficult for games that assume you’re actually going to be continuously attentive over 20+ minutes at a time when you can be interrupted by breaking up a fight with the pets, having to let the new puppy outside regularly, hearing the cat about to hack up a hairball, cleaning up the ice cream the kid just dropped, etc…

If it was up to me, I would have canceled a while ago. My wife, and my mom who shared my plan will be fine coughing up the extra few dollars a month to keep it. I think forums like this get a skewed world view since they’re populated by the kinds of people that would be fine setting up their own media server and just pirating what they want, or just churning services to binge watch what they want from each one every few months. I think Netflix(and other services) know that the average user is just going to keep going, even if the price continues to rise gradually over time.

The one thing that might tip the scales is people that set up their own media server and then share that with family and friends. I’ve got a few family members sharing my Plex, but I can also see that they don’t actually watch much. My niece seems to be the one person that will actually ask me to add content for her, so maybe it’s a generational thing where the people that have already used streaming services for a decade or more will keep going, but they’ll see a drop off of new users as they find something else.