I realized after reading about people with aphantasia that what I do is kind of a combination of visualization and conceptualization. If you ask me to imagine a cow, I’ll tend to visualize the cow itself, but it doesn’t come with a field for the cow to stand in. The cow is just in the concept of a place. That is, until I concentrate on visualizing details of the place, at which point I’ll probably lose the visual of the cow. Like, it’s still there, it’s just become the concept of a cow.

1:60 = one minute and 60 seconds, or two minutes.

120 would be parsed as one minute and 20 seconds, or 80 seconds.

Took me a bit to get too.

I fixed it lol

I still don’t get why it’s called that.

That is such a funny mental image.

“Drink” is such a weird word in how it has both a general and specific meaning, but no other word for the general meaning is commonly used.

“Drink your milk! No drinking until you’re 21!”

My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.

So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

What they should do is push for voting reform. There are tons of proposals for voting systems that solve the two party stalemate and the issue of gerrymandering.

If they really wanted to stop the insanity of the Republican party, that’s what they would do. Until they do, they are complicit in it.

That was my first thought too. What’s this orb pondering business everyone’s on about?

Fair. I didn’t understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.

As for ads targeted at black consumers… now I’m curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream_of_Wheat#/media/File%3ACream_of_Wheat_Breakfast_Bell_1918_advertisement.jpg ?

Ah, hm… I guess that makes sense. Bringing people to the office raises the value of surrounding retail, which in turn raises the value of the office. Thanks, that explanation clears it up.

Buying something to create artificial demand usually isn’t a good investment strategy. A “pump-and-dump” can work if you can set off a buying frenzy and sell before it wears off, but it’s not a long-term strategy.

Besides, if that was the plan, leaving the buildings vacant would be just as effective as using them.

Ok, so it’s about responding to local government incentives? I feel like that’s an important piece of the puzzle that’s overlooked when people say it’s about real estate prices.

I see, so the idea is that they’re responding to external pressure from governments and financial institutions? I guess I could see that, though it shouldn’t be hard to prove by pointing to specific policies and loan conditions.

But also, some of these companies own those buildings. If they’re not in use, their value in the market drops.

How does that work? Why would a buyer care if the seller was using the building? If anything, I would think using them would depreciate their value due to wear and tear.

Yeah, I’ve been having the same issue. It clears the page after a BRIEF period of inactivity.

Here I thought I was doing OpenAI a favor by keeping garbage out of their training data…

This comic is still around? I haven’t thought of it in years!

Henry George wrote about this extensively. The solution is a tax on all land at just under 100% of it’s rental value. That allows landlords to profit from the structures they build and maintain, but not from the land itself. It disincentivizes real estate speculation, lowering the cost of land and housing and improving accessibility to people who use it productively.

They’re written differently, but pronounced the same.

As an uninvolved party, after reading the thread, I understand that you feel frustrated and misunderstood. But I’m sorry to say that I feel like the failure of reading comprehension was on your part more than theirs.

It seems like the majority of people who responded to you argued that there are not two evils, but two parts to the same whole evil.

No one, that I saw, claimed you were saying that the Democrats were not evil. But the disagreement was that you see the Republicans and Democrats as two evils, while your opponents see them as one.

Whether or not you agree, that seems like a logically coherent belief to hold.