I dunno about that. I bought a house well within what I could afford. The bank actually thought we made a mistake and reminded us they would approve a loan double the size of what we asked.

All it takes is two or three really expensive things needing work at the same time to blow your budget out of the water. And often there’s no clear answer on what’s truly urgent.

Water is entropy manifest to constantly remind you that anything you do is temporary and laughably futile on geologic timescales.

Gotta love having an old house. It’s simultaneously reassuring and deeply stressful when a professional looks at something that seems really bad and just says, “Well, I can tell from the layers of paint that’s been there a long time. So if it hasn’t become a problem in all that time, it’s probably fine. But give me a call if your house starts falling apart.”

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character… and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won’t negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it’s attracting a bad crowd, and there’s too many people around now.

There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.

There are certainly stories of overzealous enforcement, but the context of Loi 101 and its amendments is worth considering.

Québecois is really interesting. It has a lot of old, outdated French in it due to the colonial connection with France being severed hundreds of years ago, where it evolved distinctly and the locals made different decisions on what to change and how to adapt to new concepts.

One could argue the French government has been obsessive about policing language much longer with the académie française.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.

It’d be interesting for one of these games to have realistic planning and permitting mechanics.

“Your permit is delayed a week because the only person at City Hall who reviews them is on vacation.”

“To add a 6 ft fence, you need to go before the local planning board and convince them it’s necessary. You can reduce the height to 4 ft to avoid this.”

“The power company installed the meter on the wrong side of the house. They will relocate it for $10,000, and the earliest appointment is in three weeks. If they don’t, you have to relocate the HVAC unit and reroute the ductwork to account for that. Further, the electrician will charge $9,000 to adjust the wiring for the different meter location.”

English used to have this! Yea/nay for positive, and yes/no for negative I believe. The former fell out of common use.

The fragmenting of teams needs more attention. My group uses a follow the sun model that has our team split up across at least seven countries, plus a decent chunk are always contracted through a vendor. Add in remote workers, and it’s very difficult to see an effective way to organize.

It’s definitely become more of a thing in the past 10-15 years. When I was a kid, outside of ice cream there was just Del’s. The hot wiener trucks did not come our way I guess… or they didn’t want to compete with the brick and mortar ny systems.

I’m thrilled with the food culture we have now though. We punch way above our weight when it comes to food.

So this is what Cardi B was talking about.

Thank you for reminding me these existed. Unlocked some memories that have been sitting there for decades unremembered.

I basically do the same. The tiny local bookstore I like has a big table in the middle with titles picked by the owner. Something in there will be interesting. I can always just ask the owner if I’m stumped. It’s a bit easier because I’m not a single-genre reader, so I’m spoiled for choice.

Quite a lot. The US did the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan too. Who cares about who the enemy is or how many people die if they military industrial complex is making bank?

A country doesn’t need to be a superpower to project some power, but very few rise to the level of global hegemony. I think China is probably in the superpower tier today. The belt and road initiative is classic economic hegemony shit.

China’s GDP was lower than Canada’s. Economic strength is not the only factor of a superpower, but it’s significant. It’s hard to project power effectively without sufficient wealth to fund those efforts.

Paradoxically, if you look right above that and click on whether they approve or disapprove of him, it’s 49 approve/44 disapprove right now. I’m not hugely surprised, as I’ve met several people who say they don’t like him as a person but they like XYZ thing he’s said or wants to do.

Rarely. I don’t think I ever have two years in a row.

Usually only if I’m very sure it’s a game I will get a lot of playtime out of due to past titles. For instance, I did pre-order Civ 7 because prior Civs have been the best hours-enjoyed-per-dollar investments I’ve ever made. No exaggeration, even accounting for DLCs I bought at full price.