So, since she knew what the press had done to her husband and his family (including literally hounding his mother to death), it's her choice to be relentlessly hounded and bullied by the tabloid press, and have ZERO right to privacy even for very personal medical matters, for the rest of her life? William didn't have a choice, does he deserve it too? What the press is doing to Kate is absolutely vile. What they did to Diana, and continue to do to Harry and Meghan, and now William and Kate, and which they will surely do to George and Charlotte and Louis in the future, is predatory verging on psychopathic. No one deserves that, and there is no amount of money that can compensate for the impact of relentless bullying, personal attacks, and invasion of privacy on the mental health of a fellow human being.

I do, but I'm not sure it's necessary since they switched to a pump. I just got used to keeping it in the fridge when they sold it in dropper bottles, because that would go bad pretty quickly from air exposure.

One of the HCA sites recently profiled a guy whose social media was full of all the usual antivax, anti-Fauci, "it's just a cold, wake up sheeple" stuff, who ended up in the ICU for many months before being sent home hooked to an oxygen tank with less than 30% lung function. Was in and out of the hospital over the following 18 months as he caught multiple new respiratory infections one after the other, until he finally passed away, but he never once blamed covid or thought that maybe getting vaccinated would have been a good idea. Right up to the end he was blaming remdesivir, intubation, and the hospital's refusal to give him ivermectin ("which has been proven effective"), even claiming that his doctors said they had never seen covid "do so much damage to a healthy guy like me." Because of course covid is usually totally benign in overweight men in their 50s, so no one could possibly have predicted that it would severely damage his heart and lungs. I've also seen social media posts from antivaxers with symptoms of long covid who blame the vaccine even though they never had it — it's all those vaxed mudbloods walking around shedding viruses (including HIV???) who are causing the problems!

This. When I was in HS we had to buy our own locks and I can remember standing in the store in front of a box of locks (back when locks were just loose in a box instead of encased in thick plastic), and I'd go through the whole box looking for the easiest to remember combinations (which were on a tag with each lock) and then trying different locks to see which were easiest to open. There was a significant, objective difference in how easy vs "fussy" the locks were — some you really had to get absolutely perfect on every number and if you under- or over-shot the number by a millimeter you had to start over. One year I ended up with a fussy lock and it was such a PITA, sometimes I'd have to do the whole routine 2-3 times to get it perfect enough to open, and who has time for that when you're rushing to class? And that's probably a much more common issue with built-in locks in old school lockers. I can totally understand a kid who gets assigned to a locker with a temperamental PITA lock deciding that it's just not worth the hassle and it's easier to just carry stuff around.

Same! I think it's hilarious that we all got a recommendation for the same obscure group at around the same time — do they think we're dull because we're on a homeschool board? Did we all google something last week that triggered it? (ETA: The group, both men and women, post about things that are generally more esoteric/nerdy than dull. It's mostly tongue in cheek, and some of the folks (especially the Brits) are very funny. It's not actually a group for dull men looking for dates, lol)

The process of "figuring things out" often requires multiple steps, and even knowing how to break down the task into those steps may not be intuitive for a lot of people, or may be overwhelming for reasons outside their control (LDs, cognitive issues, mental health, etc.) Even people who may normally be pretty good at figuring things out for themselves may simply not have the time, energy, or bandwidth to do so when under pressure. I've always been a figure-it-out-myself person, both by nature and necessity (abusive neglectful parents), but I have a kid with ADHD and anxiety who is great at some kinds of figuring-it-out and completely overwhelmed by other kinds (although at least he's good about asking for help when overwhelmed). And then I have another kid who thinks she's great at figuring things out and rarely asks for help, but unfortunately she often "figures things out" in an incorrect or incomplete way because her solutions are based on stuff-she-already-knows, without understanding that some of the information she needs is stuff she doesn't know yet! It's easy to say "kids need to be taught how to figure stuff out," but I think that's actually harder to implement than it sounds. It involves teaching them how to figure out what the actual problem is to begin with, break down the task of finding a solution into multiple steps, find the information they need to complete those steps (including figuring out what they need to know that they don't know), and then implement those steps, plus knowing how to reorganize and redirect if something changes or isn't working. And honestly I think a lot of that is just inborn personality and innate skill. Some people just intuitively know how to analyze problems and find solutions in a logical way, so they take for granted that everyone should be able to do that, but not everyone is wired that way. And that's also what makes it a difficult skill set to teach, because most of the people who are good at it are intuitively good at it, and it's not easy to teach something that "just comes naturally" to people for whom it's not natural at all.

As someone who previously worked really crazy long hours in a very high stress job, I know too well the incredible toll that takes on your mind and body — and you really don't realize how bad it is until you're out of it. Stress not only shortens your life, it drains all the joy out of the time that you do get, so I would choose the option that gives you the most flexibility and the least stress. If you ask people on their deathbed what they would have done differently, not many are going to say that they wish they'd worked longer hours at a more stressful job, but many will likely say they wish they spent more time with their kids when they were little. If your signature is accurate, you've got less than a decade before all your kids are grown and flown, so I would make the most of the time you have with them, because it's going to be gone in the blink of an eye.

In many places, including my city, those modest 1000 sq' 50-100 yr old houses that you assume are available to young lower-income workers sell for over half a million dollars and rent for $2200-2600/month. A family with two full time workers earning $20/hr would be spending 50% of their take-home pay to rent a 1000 sq' house that hasn't been updated since 1978, and there's no way they could afford to buy it. The only options here for those who are truly low income are subsidized apartments, and there aren't nearly enough of those, with long waitlists. There is a HUGE housing gap here for people who make what would be considered a decent middle class income by most metrics. The problem isn't that those folks "consider themselves too good to live in a low-income area," the problem is that there literally aren't any neighborhoods like that anywhere in the city. A family with a combined income of $80K is going to be paying ~35-40% of their income just to rent a small 2 BR apartment, and they will likely never be able to afford to buy a home here.

More data on the effects of short term rentals: In 2018, the city of Irvine, CA, banned all short term rentals of less than 30 days and (more importantly) they strictly enforced it. "After Irvine's ban went into effect, long-term rents in the city dropped by 3%, according to the study, a decrease of $114 a month on average. ..... While the Irvine study showed that Airbnb bans can successfully drive down rents, numerous studies have shown the other side of the coin: When short-term rentals come to town, rents go up. A 2020 study on short-term rentals in Berlin found that apartments listed on Airbnb increased the rents of nearby units. A 2017 study in Boston came to a similar conclusion. Other studies have documented these impacts on rents nationwide, including research from 2021 that estimated that Airbnb listings accounted for one-fifth of rent growth in ZIP codes with a median share of people who own and occupy their home. " https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-ban-makes-rents-housing-prices-drop-irvine-california-study-2023-11

Research from Purdue University on the impact of STRs on local housing costs — and note that the data in this research was from 2014-2017, so the situation is much worse now: "What Does Airbnb Do to the Local Housing Market? Make It Less Affordable Home-sharing platforms, particularly Airbnb, have enjoyed tremendous growth over the last decade, as property owners have capitalized on the opportunity to offer rooms, apartments and entire homes to travelers seeking short-term rentals. The proliferation of Airbnb properties has sparked criticism that Airbnb hosts are snatching up homes that would otherwise be listed in the residential rental or housing market, thus reducing supply and driving up prices. But is this really happening? Does home sharing make it less affordable to rent or buy homes in a particular market? Indeed, it does, according to research by Zaiyan Wei, assistant professor in Krannert School of Management, and his co-authors, Wei Chen of University of Arizona and Karen Xie of University of Denver. They found that in three U.S cities where Airbnb had implemented a policy to restrict hosts to a single address, rents and home values dropped by about 3 percent. "Airbnb is indeed making the real estate market more expensive," Wei says. By enriching its hosts while making housing less affordable for others, Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms may be compromising public affordability for private wealth, the research suggests. "It's going to increase the gap between the rich and the poor," Wei says. "It's going to make inequality a little worse." The researchers used a unique quasi-experiment on Airbnb—a platform policy that capped the number of properties a host could manage in certain cities—to explore how home sharing affects local residential markets. Airbnb announced its so-called "one host, one home" policy for New York City and San Francisco in April 2016 and implemented it seven months later. In February 2017, it implemented the same policy in Portland, without a prior announcement. The policy induced hosts with listings at more than one address to place the extra properties in local residential markets, while deterring them from taking other properties off the market. These conditions gave the researchers an opportunity to study the impact of Airbnb on the long-term rental and for-sale housing market. To conduct their study, they created a comparison group of zip codes from cities that were similar to the three policy-affected cities but had not been affected by the policy. Their main sample included more than 400 zip codes from ten cities across the U.S., including New York City, San Francisco and Portland. They studied data from Airbnb, residential platform Zillow and a third-party real estate information company over a period of almost three years (October 2014 to July 2017). They found that the "one host, one home" policy led to a drop in both rents and home values in the affected zip codes. Rents declined by 1.2 percent and home values by 1.7 percent when the policy was announced, and rents dropped by 2.3 percent and home values by 1.3 percent when the policy was implemented. "People either choose to buy a house or to find a place to rent, so these two markets are connected," Wei says. "In equilibrium, these two markets should stay relatively stable. The policy shouldn't affect one market more than the other one."They also found that the policy increased the supply in both the rental and housing market, and also increased equilibrium quantities (the number of homes rented or sold) in a similar magnitude. Exploring how the policy affected the supply of properties listed on Airbnb, they found that the number of properties of "multi-listing" hosts —those who manage properties at different addresses—shrank significantly, as would be expected. In contrast, properties managed by single-listing hosts—those who have a property at only one address on Airbnb—seemed to increase. These new listings, however, are primarily shared or private rooms, which are less likely to have been taken off residential markets. The study shows that home sharing has become a major alternative for real estate investment and has a significant impact on housing affordability. Noting that platforms have the ability to self-govern—as Airbnb has done in New York City, San Francisco and Portland—the researchers suggest that platforms should be "mindful of unexpected societal impact" and should "proactively self-govern for goodwill." https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/?research=7145

The crazy high cost of both renting and owning right now really goes back to the 2008 financial crisis, when new building plummeted and private equity firms and hedge funds took advantage of the crisis by snapping up a lot of cheap houses (more than 3 million foreclosures in 2008 alone), turning them into rentals, and now we have a new explosion in converting single family homes to STR. It will be many years before builders are able to catch up to the demand for home ownership, and of course they're going to start by building the houses that make them the most money.

In theory, he's correct that many places have minimum sq' requirements that preclude smaller homes, but in reality that is not why builders are not building smaller homes. There is currently a shortage of more than 5 million homes in the US, and there is pent up demand at all levels of size/price, so of course builders are going to build the houses that are most profitable for them, which are large, high-end homes. They are not going to build small, more affordable homes without some kind of incentive, like requiring developers to build a certain number of affordable units in return for approving projects with lots of large expensive homes. In my city, where there is desperate need for affordable housing, the only two types of building projects I see happening right now are huge new apartment complexes near the city center and McMansions being built on tiny lots near the edges of town where there is still land to build on. The apartments will at least provide housing close to jobs (and we do have very good public transit here), but won't really solve the problem of no starter homes for young families. You'd have to go pretty far west or south of here to find a 50-60 year old 1000 sq' foot starter home for under half a million — and then you'd probably need a real estate agent to tip you off before it gets listed, because rental companies are snapping those up for cash with no contingencies and turning them into rentals.

When I left my last job, I repeatedly told friends and coworkers that I did NOT want a going away party, but apparently they wanted one, so they "surprised" me anyway. And it was on a day when I was totally exhausted and sleep deprived, my hair and clothes were a mess, and I looked every bit as shitty as I felt, so when I walked into a room to find 100+ people yelling "Surprise!" I wanted to murder the people who organized it and then crawl in a hole. This is how I feel about surprise parties:

I really dislike surprises, and IME when people insist on surprising someone who has repeatedly made it clear that they do. not. like. them, there is usually some kind of agenda there. My sister once "surprised" me by inviting my estranged mother with her on a visit, and it permanently changed my relationship with her. One of my brothers surprised my other brother by flying in unannounced for a visit, only to discover that brother #2 was out of the country, so he added to the surprise by "fixing up" a few things in brother #2's house that brother #1 thought needed fixing (which did not go over well). My father once came to visit me in the UK to help with some DIY projects, but then decided that rather than help with the things I asked for, he'd "surprise" me by "fixing" other things I did not want him messing with, which was the opposite of helpful as it made even more work for me in the long run. I think some men (not all men blah blah blah) have a tendency to interpret being given a gift list or being asked to help with something around the house as "being told what to do," and they have this subconscious "you're not the boss of me" reaction, so they decide to go off script with a "surprise" present or do a requested chore as a "surprise," which makes it something they chose to do rather than something they were "told" to do. And then if the recipient isn't totally thrilled with a "surprise" she didn't want and didn't ask for, well that just proves how picky, controlling, impossible, etc., she is.

The author is listed as "anonymous," and the two "editors" are vehement anti-vaxers spreading the usual misinformation all over social media, including that covid shots cause cancer. They claim vaccines had nothing to do with eradication of childhood diseases, and instead blame pretty much all modern illnesses, including SIDS, autism, and the high rates of maternal and infant mortality in the US, on childhood vaccines. If you look at the reviews that the publisher includes, they are all by other antivaxers and authors of books like Outsmarting Autism, A Compromised Generation, and Brain Under Attack. The fact that this was recommended to you by someone who is "generally sane" shows just how insidious the spread of antivax propaganda has become.

I hope the meds work really well in every positive way that they're supposed to, with minimal side effects, and you get through the next two weeks as easily and comfortably as possible. Sending lots of (((hugs))) and good juju!

The word "rights" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. "It protects every one of us to avoid taking rights away from people" is predicated on the assumption that the people getting screwed in this scenario have no rights to begin with, so the only "right" we need to be concerned about is the right of some people to hoard scarce resources in order to increase personal profit. Why should we prioritize the "right" of a small minority of people to own as many houses as they can snap up, and rent them for as much as they can get, while other people have zero "right" to even the most basic level of housing security, let alone the right to ever own a modest home of their own? Why should we prioritize the "right" of temporary tourists to stay in a single family home instead of a hotel, over the right of local workers to have an affordable place to live and raise their families? This is not a system that "protects us all," this is a system that protects the "rights" of the Haves to continually profit from the poverty of the Have Nots — while blaming the Have Nots for not pulling their bootstraps hard enough.

Replacing 6 small starter homes with 3 large luxury homes is even worse than buying two modest 1500 sq' homes and using one for STR, because at least the home being used for STR could eventually be returned to the market as a home for a small family.

This argument basically boils down to "the rights of the wealthy to hoard desperately needed resources should not be infringed upon." I think everyone agrees that hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic was morally wrong. But how is that any different from hoarding housing, to the point that people cannot afford to have a roof over their heads without spending an untenable percentage of their income and/or living so far from their jobs that they have long commutes (and therefore spend another significant % of their income on gas and car maintenance, because the US also totally sucks at public transport)? "Just build more affordable housing." Except that the same people who already own property — especially multiple properties — don't want their taxes increased to pay for that, and often object to having "the poor" in their area, so it's really just lip service. One way some cities are dealing with the housing crisis is relaxing density regulations and allowing people to add an ADU on their property that they can rent out. That allows people to "make money off their property" without taking affordable housing options away from other people. And if they do long term rentals, then it increases affordable options as well.

"This thing that is happening all over the country and contributing to a severe shortage of affordable housing is no worse than this theoretical thing that doesn't actually happen" is not a strong argument. Who is buying two homes, building a very large new home across two lots, and then "renting out a spare room" to make money? No one. But people buying up affordable starter homes and converting them to STRs is a serious problem all over the country. I watch a lot of remodeling and house flipping shows, and one YT channel I've followed for a long time is Austin Flipsters. When I first started watching them, they were buying wrecked houses, fixing them up and selling them. Now they are buying houses in good condition and redoing them specifically as STRs, plus they have set up a second business helping other people buy and convert homes to STRs. So most of the houses they are doing now involve taking good basic starter homes and converting to VRBO and AirBNB properties, exacerbating what is already a severe shortage of affordable housing. I think that sucks, and I wish that STRs would be subject to enough taxes and regulation that it would be a much less appealing and less profitable way for people who are well off and are already on the property ladder to increase their own wealth by screwing young people and lower-paid workers out of affordable housing options. Young people who are stuck paying 50% of their income on rent and having long commutes are not going to be able to afford to have children, or save for retirement, or even have decent emergency funds, and the long term effects of that are being ignored while the wealthy are increasingly allowed to screw everyone else for short term gain.