Rivalarrival

My disability insurance would pay off my house and my car. A HELOC would cover several thousand dollars worth of emergency expenses. I haven’t paid off my mortgage yet, but I own a very large percentage of my home. You overgeneralized well beyond the point of absurdity.

Moleskin! Excellent for protecting blisters and abrasions.

Also, two weeks? You want to tell your doctor if abrasions on your feet are taking a long time to heal.

If you have a mortgage, you do not own your home. It can and will be taken away from you the second you are disabled or otherwise out of work. This is a false statement. You predicated your argument on this false statement. The rest of what you said has a modicum of truth, but the core principle you used to prop up your argument is false. Just go back and re-base your argument on something other than the idea that a house isn’t owned until it is completely paid off. Drop that claim, and the rest of your point is perfectly valid. Keeping that claim undermines your credibility. You don’t need that claim to be true to make your point; there is no sense in dying on this particular hill.

You ok there, bud? Having a bad day or something?

Everything old is new again… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)

The purpose of a class is to instill a specific set of knowledge and skills. The purpose of an assignment is to provide the student with sufficient pressure to study the expected knowledge, and practice the expected skills. The assignment is the pressure to learn; it is not evidence of learning. To the student who has achieved mastery of that knowledge and skillset prior to completing the class, an assignment has no valid purpose. For such a student, the assignment is busywork, and serves only to distract the student from further study. If your grading style does not allow for a student to demonstrate mastery and refuse busywork assignments, your grading is a problem. A student with test scores equal or better than the class average does not deserve to fail your class for having refused assignments. A student who ritualistically completes all of their homework assignments with excellent marks, but is entirely unable to pass a test on the subject matter, is a student who has failed your class.

Assignments are not evidence of learning. Assignments are pressure for students to learn. They are motivation to spend time acquiring knowledge and practicing skills expected to be acquired from the class. For students who master this knowledge and skill without that pressure, assignments are distractions from further study. They force the student to expend time and energy on previously-mastered material, rather than allowing them to focus on unmastered subjects or additional classes. If I were building a grading rubric, I would say that the test score at the end of each unit is the minimum score recorded for any assignment in that unit. My tests would be killers: I would target 80% raw scores, but final test scores would be on a curve, with the median score being recorded as an “A”. Score a 100% raw score on a unit test, and every assignment for that unit is raised to 100%. The student has demonstrated complete mastery of the subject matter; any grade less than 100% does not reflect their true capability. Score an 80% raw score on the unit test, and every assignment for that unit is at least an 80%. A 95% assignment stays a 95%, but a 45% assignment is counted as 80%. Missing assignments are counted as 80%, not 0%. I would go further: the raw score on the final exam replaces every lower grade in the grade book. You ace that indomitable horror of a final exam, you ace the class, regardless of how much effort you put in.

All we can say from the given scenario is that the student has not demonstrated mastery of the subject material. It could be that the teacher fucked up, and tested improperly. I’ve seen tests that didn’t reflect the subject matter; the teacher failed. It could be that Mom or Dad were the ones completing the student’s assignments for them all year. The student never actually learned anything; the student failed. If every student had the same experience, I’d be happy to point fingers at the teacher. But when virtually all her students pass, and this one “workaholic” kid can’t, that’s not on the teacher. That’s on the kid. (Apparent) hard work is not evidence of mastery.

Giving away boot straps? That sounds like socialism to me.

ASS!

What we need, desperately, is a restoration of the 91% top-tier tax rate, that nobody ever paid, and nobody ever will pay. The purpose of such a tax rate isn’t revenue. The purpose is avoidance. What companies have to do to avoid that tax is exactly what the economy needs. The largest businesses need to reduce prices to lower revenue below the line. Alternatively, they need to Increase business spending, which reduces their taxable income by paying more to employees and outside workers for products and services. Capital Gains need to be taxed progressively, and higher than labor. The Social Security tax limit needs to be eliminated, and cap gains needs to be subject to this tax as well. Social security tax needs to be shifted from regressive to progressive. The social security benefit age needs to be incrementally decreased until Social Security is a UBI system instead of a retirement system.

A nitpick: no you aren’t, unless you don’t have property tax and homeowners insurance in escrow paid out of your mortgage payment. I understand where you’re coming from. You’re not wrong. However, I’m paying those even if I’m renting. (Granted, not to the tax man or the insurance company, but the landlord certainly counts them when he hikes the rent price.) Further, in owning, those expenses continue even after I’ve paid off the mortgage. Here, we’re looking at the differences between renting and owning. Since I can’t avoid those expenses under either circumstance, we can ignore them here. In this same category, we could also include condo fees, homeowner association fees, storm sewer fees, etc.

You’re just going to completely ignore the principal benefit of home ownership? “Renting” means 70 years of annually-increasing monthly payments, and leaving nothing to your kids. “Owning” means 30 years of fixed monthly payments, 40 years of no payments, and bequeathing an actual estate to your kids. I’ve been in my current home 20 years; I’ve already made 20 years of payments on my current home. I’m paying the fixed monthly price I negotiated 20 years ago, back when my house was worth a fraction of what it is currently worth. My mortgage payment now is a little more than the rent payment would have been 20 years ago. My mortgage payment now is about 1/3 the rent payment for comparable homes in my area. My mortgage payment will continue to be fixed for the next 10 years, while rents will be hiked 10 more times. I don’t need to fight for “rent control”; I already have it. The equity thing is always brought up, You do not entirely comprehend of the concept of “equity”. You come close, but you just don’t quite get there: The other houses on the market have increased in value along with it. Exactly. The proceeds from the sale of one home pay for the next, and the next, and the next… I’ve made 20 years of mortgage payments on my current home. I have also made 20 years of mortgage payments on my next home. And 20 years of mortgage payments on the home after that. In 10 years, I will have paid off my current home, and I’ll be living “rent free”, wherever I happen to be living. (Theoretically,) I won’t ever need to make another house payment, and I’ll be able to leave a home, (or the value of a home), to my kids. That’s what “Equity” actually means. Not this “taking out loans” crap, nor the “making a profit when you go back to renting”. The entire concept of “renting” needs to die in a goddamn fire. You’re literally better off playing the lottery than pissing away your hard earned money on a housing subscription.

Cartoon beaver? That’s a lawsuit.

Came here for the math.

20g but 17ml?!? I was promised that metric masses and volumes were interchangeable! They told me I wouldn’t have to use any weird conversion ratio! Liars! (/s)

Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice. Do this, but also Freeze 'em. The beetles you’re talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I’d suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don’t need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets. Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry. An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.

Exactly. Rent would need to be high enough to cover taxes, insurance, maintenance. But somewhere along the line, landlords decided that it also had to cover financing: Rent had to pay the mortgage on top of everything else. Things get pretty stupid when financing is involved. The interest I’m being charged will buy the bank two homes along with my own, and fucking everybody has, is, or will be paying a mortgage, either directly to a bank, or via a landlord. I think the solution is an owner-occupancy property tax credit that holds a resident’s property tax where it is, accompanied by a massive property tax hike that only applies to properties the owner doesn’t use as their primary residence. I think that landlords would fight tooth and nail to convert their tenants into “buyers” by offering private mortgages or land contracts instead of rental agreements.