I've had wildly varying experiences. The first one I used didn't really do much of anything I couldn't (or didn't) do myself. He looked up things on MLS, sometimes took me to houses that were terrible (a neighborhood where all the houses had bars on the windows, a house with a big hump down the main hallway). He did no negotiating and had no real advice to give on what we should offer. The second was better but made mistakes that could have been huge. I had to argue with him over a contract that he sent that said that the house I was selling was the house I was living in, when I had never lived in it. Obvious error. He couldn't see it. My last one was really good, but I also made it easy. Basically, "I think I want to buy this house. Can you show it to me? Yes, I do want to buy it. Sold." After we bought it, the seller's agent sent a postcard to everyone in the community (that I now lived in) bragging about getting a list price sale, when she had nothing to do with me buying it AND was unreachable when we were trying to look at the house and had trouble getting in. And they'd already cut the price on the house, so it was less "list price" and more "lowered it until it was reasonable". I don't think the seller got 6% of value out of that agent.

Personally, I agree with people saying paying $30,000 commission to sell a $500k house is a little nuts. The real estate market around here was on fire last year and selling a house took basically no effort. Put it on the market and you'd get multiple offers at list or higher. Your land example was the opposite. That agent earned every bit of their 10%. I guess that gets to the core of it: they should be paid based on the value they provide. Sometimes it's a lot. Sometimes it's not.

What is a castle if not a huge wall around a small town?

A huge wall defended by armed people around a small area in a time when technology was primitive.

The issue isn't that walls don't work. It's that they don't work by themselves. A certain candidate for president in 2016 spent a lot of time pretending they do, and he was going to spend $billions building a 2000 mile "unclimbable" wall. Prototypes were built. People climbed them. Cut through them. Etc. I remember at one point it was supposed to be 30' tall. Home Depot sells 40' ladders. Tunnels will be dug under them. It's a lot easier to dig tunnels under walls in 2023 than it was in medieval times, but they did it back then, too.

I'm not opposed to stopping people entering the country illegally. I'm not a fan of spending billions of dollars so people will buy a ladder and rope. Show me a plan that'll actually work, not just be a political stunt.

We used to have literal snake oil and cough medicine with morphine. OTOH, homeopathic "remedies" that do nothing other than move money from your wallet to someone else's are still allowed, so it's a bit of a mixed bag for sure.

It's not a patch. Knowing approximately where your stolen car is a tremendously inferior solution to it not being stolen. Personally, I have a family member whose car was stolen, recovered, repaired (In$urance deductible), then stolen again and never recovered. They should have recalled them, and didn't, so Hyundai and Kia are firmly on my never buy list.

Hate to break it to ya, but that ship sailed decades ago.

Ah, yes. $2B is definitely money well spent for free advertising. Thatâ(TM)ll certainly help get the word out to customers who can afford $100M planes who havenâ(TM)t heard of Boeing before.

Short answer: it doesn't.

Funny how they're all like "SOVEREIGNTY BITCHES, checkmate, you can't stop us now!" as if sanctions aren't a thing.

Or, like, soldiers walking across a border. Or police kicking in the door of the physical house they're in while engaging in some conduct in this fantasyland that's illegal in the jurisdiction they're physically sitting in.

You can consider yourself anything you want. To actually *be* a country, you need other countries to go along with it. See "sovereign citizens" and how that generally works out for them.

This is not correct. It's also illegal for companies to merge in ways that substantially reduce competition. You can't just buy all your competitors and jack up prices, even if they're in the same vertical.

Having a master key for a legal search warrant is what the police should have had in the first place.

It's disturbing this still has to be said, but the problem with that is that ANY master key will be disclosed to people who shouldn't have it. It's not like giving only police a master key to every door. It's just breaking all the doors such that sooner or later, they won't keep anyone out, and you, a door owner, probably won't even know your door doesn't work anymore.

And yet any phone I had before the iPhone would die an immediate death if you got it wet. Phones used to have moisture sensors in them that would void the warranty, and being in a room with a hot shower was enough to turn those suckers pink.

There are plenty of things I don't love about Apple, but I do love that my last iPhone was underwater for over 3 hours and, aside from a glitchy 24 hours after, worked well for another year. I'm all for replaceable batteries, but I wouldn't trade a phone that's relatively impervious to water for it.

If a well-funded group wants your drives, you're probably not shipping them anywhere to be destroyed. It's being done on site, under supervision.

It's not just security, it's also cost/benefit. How much am I going to get selling used, out of warranty drives in bulk? How much does it cost me to securely erase the data on them vs just running them through a shredder?

There isn't one. SSDs are crushed or shredded.