I was clicking around Zillow a few days ago and noticed the First Street link. I clicked on it for a few local homes where I know exactly where they are and they gave some of them nonexistent flood and wildfire risks. I don't know how they distill their data but I'd say they're doing it wrong, or erring on the side of paranoia. As both a homeowner and a potential home buyer it's not something I would ever look at. In California you need to rely on the Natural Hazard Disclosure Report for the property you are looking to buy.

Also, flood zone determinations as a general thing are often widely disputed for insurance purposes, sometimes properties are not considered to be in a flood zone when they should be, and sometimes they are considered in a flood zone when they are not.

Folded it's nearly 1/2" thick. Perfectly fine for an inside jacket pocket. but where I live you only wear jackets about half the year. The rest of the time you have to shove it into a pants pocket, no thanks. My S23-Ultra is already bulky enough with the Otterbox around it.

Also, one more hinge point is one more mechanical thing to break.

It would be nice to have on an airplane flight though.

They tried to do Jesus, but passengers kept calling security about a hippy boarding the plane.

A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.

The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through the game, not so much.

It would be interesting to fish through the code to see how it was put together.

Talk about exploiting a loophole. Had no idea that was happening. I'm assuming they did not pass on the savings. I've never seen a third party booking go down in price after being booked.

When I book directly with Marriott while signed in, the lowest price is usually 'flexible' (You can cancel it.) Sometimes I use third party sites to get a really low price if I know I'm not going to cancel, but lately I've been booking directly with the hotel to avoid hassles if it's a major chain I have a login for.

Due to business travel, I had a year or two where I had platinum elite status with Marriott. (the only scenario in which earning status points has any effect - if you live out of a hotel for 3 - 5 days a week and someone else is paying for it, or you launder a ton of purchases through a points credit card, but those can have yearly maximums) The various perks were nice and there were enough points to pay for a lot of our personal hotel stays for that year, with free room upgrades wherever we went. Fun while it lasted.

It must be nice to have the luxury of doing that. For most of us that kind of money would be a helpful windfall in these rough times.

...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.

That skill proved useful in his later career.

It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.

I don't allow smart appliances or home automation in my house. And really, it's an easy choice. The cheapest stuff does not include that technology. You have to spend more to get a fridge with a screen.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues and information sharing, which all of us here are familiar with, there's another overriding reason not to have smart appliances or home automation - reliability. When you add complexity, things break more often, and costs go up. Obsolescence of your investment happens fairly quickly.

My line of work involves sometimes working inside of very high end homes and the newer ones contain every automation bell and whistle you can think of. And they break, and fail, a lot. One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works. The more complexity you add to a system, the greater chance of a failure. These are people that paid a premium for these features, and I think they were sold a bill of goods.

Home automation companies market whiz-bang features to high end home builders and their customers, not letting on that A. The ecosystem of hundreds of different products they are assembling is not perfect nor trouble free, and B. Whatever they are putting in the house now will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, and it will become more difficult to maintain over the next 10, 20, 30 years without substantial upgrades and replacements. What is state of the art now will probably be seen as fairly archaic when the house is sold again. For large homes and mansions, there is probably a middle ground somewhere that allows for some automation, but has enough manual control so that if something fails the device in question is still operable. This is not what I'm seeing in the newest systems. They are entirely reliant on a server for things as basic as turning lights on and off. Where a light switch would be, there is a keypad with five or six buttons, none of which anyone ever uses except the top button that turns the light on and off, and it's harder to find and press vs. a traditional light switch. The idea of being able to have dimming presets, etc. sounds flashy, but in reality they go largely unused. The biggest visual effect of course is when you push the button, it slowly fades the lights on. I find that annoying. I just want it on. Maybe that's just me and my old school ass that grew up with regular light switches. Being around this stuff has completely absolved me of ever wanting it in my own home, and I used to be a pretty big home automation enthusiast in the early days of Homeseer, X-10, Insteon, etc.

For a regular sized home on a regular suburban lot, there is no need for home automation. It is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. If you want to change the temperature, go adjust the thermostat on the wall. If you want to turn on a light, go hit the switch. There have been plenty of examples of home automation companies going under and the network enabled features of their appliances are suddenly rendered useless. With my dumb home, the problems don't exist. I don't have to do anything, maintain anything or subscribe to anything. It's bliss.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

-

1.) I just want to see a reference for this. You do understand that it's possible for a Left leaning person to have African ancestry, right?

2.) I've never heard someone with African ancestry living in America ask the public to refer to them with the term mention in the GP. Maybe the reference to #1 will clear this up?

3.) Even the SPLC puts the number of KKK between 3000 and 4000 individuals, in a nation of 330 million plus people. During the 1930's, one in ten Americans was a member of the KKK; today it's less than 1 in 100,000. Put another way, the concentration of white supremacists in the United States has gone from 100,000 ppm to just 10 ppm in less than a hundred years.

The reason Left leaning people never celebrate the gains made by minorities is because the underlying principle of Leftist politics is to condemn the innocent majority for factors and circumstances beyond their control. It doesn't matter how little racism actually exists, as long as there exists a shocking incident in the past, the Leftist can find reason to condemn people today, who had no actual connection to the incident or policy in question. Witness, for example, how Barak Obama characterized as racist the nation that just elected its first minority President. As a nation, the pendulum has swung so far back in the other direction that Leftists now justify DEI policies, as if more racism would somehow bring about a fairer, more just society for all. It didn't work in the past, doesn't work now, and it won't work in the future, and if the Left is realizing anything, their recent loss to an absolute imbecile must certainly have shown them that America would much rather have an asshole as President than a Left-leaning racist. You may have been able to say that you were on the right side of history 60 years ago, but you can't say that today. America has realized that racism doesn't work for us, we don't want any part of it, we've moved on, and the sooner you recognize that, the better.

After all, even the Democrats are now ashamed of their past association with the KKK, and you should be too.

And DHMO preloading for those long rides. Really makes a difference.