klardotsh

Generally correct. Here in Washington I could get Signature Solar to ship me 31 excellent Canadian Solar bifacial panels on a pallet for $9200 plus tax and shipping (so add another grand or so). This would be 21kW of solar (plus a bit if bifacial gain kicks in), which is a ton - you could even do some winter work with that, if angled correctly.

This setup would cost north of $50k (possibly north of $75k, depending) if installed by contractors. Labor costs are extremely high here, since COL is extremely high.

Increasingly common at smaller businesses in western Washington (have seen this in Seattle, Bellingham, and occasionally elsewhere).

Even where it's "technically" possible, it's becoming more difficult. Some grocery stores around here don't staff traditional teller lanes at night, shrinking down to only self-checkout, which are card-only machines. To pay cash, you'll have to escalate to the roaming attendant (or at least, I assume they can find some way to accept cash for that transaction? I can't say I've tried)

The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.

I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.

At least in the US, mortgages are typically fixed cost (I know this is not the case in many other countries, like the UK). You know when you sign the contract what your monthly cost will be, for the life of the loan. ARM loans are an exception to this, but ARM loans are nearly universally considered a terrible idea unless interest rates are egregiously high at signing time, or some other edge case applies to you.

Thus, you can budget around the mortgage payment in a predictable way, and if you have to move out because you can no longer afford it, that's a very different thing than if your property taxes magically change because a theoretical buyer may theoretically be willing to pay some astronomically higher cost for your house than you paid for it.

So, respectfully, I disagree with the framing that we have to take both or neither. They are separate budgeting concerns, and separate policy concerns.

Fixing owner-occupied property taxes to the fair market value or sale price (whichever is higher) at the time of last change in ownership (by any means: purchase, inheritance, transfer, etc.), and then adjusting that amount annually or semiannually for inflation (to account for folks who bought their house 40 years ago and would otherwise get away with paying $5 in taxes) seems like the most reasonable compromise here if we want to retain property taxation (which is debatable - an income tax can achieve everything a property tax can, without punishing folks who own their house free and clear and no longer wish to work as hard as they did while paying said house off... or can't anymore). Modulo edge cases like inflation grossly outstripping investment returns (hi, 2020s!), this ensures retired folks can stay retired.

Taxation based on the theoretical monetary value you could extract if you sold your primary domicile is probably the dumbest possible policy, because it leads to people being pushed out of their homes (or our of retirement, or into higher-paying jobs they don't want, or whatever). Houses do not have to be viewed as investment vehicles, they can simply be residences.

As far as property taxation on non-owner-occupied units... up for debate, but I think fixing to most recent transfer time's FMV works reasonably well here, too.

Sure, I meant this more in the sense that my friends' experience trying to very gently and largely unmeaningfully deviate from the petty tyrants' decrees taught me I never want to live anywhere near this type of governance structure. (unfortunately HOA-less developments are becoming more and more difficult to find and so whether you read the contract or not is slowly ceasing to matter - do you want a house or don't you? John Oliver did a great video about this stuff if you're so inclined)

Besides the fact that your hostility is unnecessary, rent prices very rarely decrease. There’s been a good deal of journalism investigating this in recent years, especially in my metro area of Seattle. Landlords would rather leave something sitting empty, potentially even off market, waiting for market rents to increase back to their target, than ever let the rent prices fall. This is especially true for landlords who own multiple units: they’ll often trickle those units out one or two at a time to avoid flooding the market, to artificially keep prices high.

This is so much of a thing that there was even a federal investigation into it (particularly the SaaS service used to help feed the data driving this trend).

While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off, and quite well may have built up to support your own aging in place. Some people want a “forever home”, and that’s okay.

In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.

Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.

My friends lost a battle to paint their garage door a slightly different shade of white than the approved Pantone shade. No private entity should ever have that degree of power over one’s private life. Petty tyrants, I tell ya.

HOAs in general are nothing but classic American privatization of that which would otherwise be public, because counties and cities here either lack the tax base (rural), budgeting skills (urban), or both, to provide the services some subdevelopments are built with.

It’s dumb. Here in Washington it’s rather common, I’m finding, for rural land plots to be part of a “Road Maintenance Association”. Exact same legal construct as an HOA, but scoped only to road maintenance on roads the county didn’t want to deal with. It would make so much more sense for the county to socialize those roads and reuse the same maintenance crews and vehicles for these stretches of road! But instead, a private entity pays through the nose to duplicate all that maintenance infrastructure (or pay contractors).

It's not called the Pacific Ring Of Fire for nothing. There's earthquakes all up and down the coast, from Chile all the way to Alaska and wrapping around to the Asian coasts, all the time.

I obviously can't speak for either of them, but in general any time their work ends up on this site, they get a new wave of horrible abuse that takes a toll on them. It seems many folks on this site are incapable of living by the adage of "live and let live", and/or are incapable of treating others how they'd like to be treated.

Welcome to where this was inevitably all going to go eventually. The entirety of commercial personal computing is going this direction: locking down APIs to make sure you’re not only doing what the company wants, but also the way the company wants. Mobile phones provide countless examples already; applying those examples to LLM world isn’t far fetched - and Anthropic already started down the road of “any old agent isn’t OUR agent” months ago.

Or it's just bang-for-buck. If a bottle of vodka can be had for anywhere even vaguely in the ballpark of a bottle of wine (and at the grocery store scale, they often are: say, $15-20 for the wine and $20-30 for the vodka), then vodka (and maybe mixers) is gonna deliver a whole lot more intoxication per dollar.

I guess I just wrote a much longer variation of "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker", eh?

(this is not drinking advice, folks: you'll do plenty more damage plenty faster with liquor, too)

This sounds... horrible? I mean, it's certainly a solution to the "wake up when this thing happens" problem, but... $SERVICE -> webhook -> $CHAT_APP -> MCP -> remote wakeup sounds both brittle and - as you said - the local code harness route is entirely unserved by something like this.

Am I having a yells-at-cloud moment where a bunch of folks are using cloud hosted LLM harnesses/environments (let's ignore the models, "of course" those are remote) and I just never saw the point?