Generally with far apart service stations they can't be closer because everything between is desolate. These stations are already on the outskirts of civilization, there isn't support to have people drive an extra 150km to man a service station.
Depending on geography diesel comes from boats, tanker trucks or planes. Solar might start getting some niche use, but it's not reliable even with batteries at a reasonable scale. The main benefit to diesel generators is it's pretty easy to fix and maintain them with minimal equipment. The amount of diesel per person for a generator isn't that much, even smallish planes can carry about a week of diesel for about 10-20 people.
When rates were low it really didn't make sense, unless you planned to be paid off before adjustments. If you have poor or average credit an ARM can get you a lower rate and the mortgage will boost your score to refinance to a fixed rate you couldn't get before. ARMs have max adjustments as well, so if you anticipate rates increasing more than that, you can get a lower rate than available at the time and in the future.
Bridge loans are less popular now, so you could get an ARM or interest only ARM on a new house and refinance later after selling your old house.
This is probably a good way to think about it, but it's not a straight scale of 0% good and 100% bad. There's a goldilocks zone in there, things above that are bad for instability, and things below are bad for lack of caution.
The rise is a correction that rates have been artificially low for 5-10 years, because the massive growth with no real risk assessment was addictive. If Fed rates get around 5% or more and they are still hinting at increases that's probably a bad sign for the long term. Short term instability already is happening.
Blizzard lost their entire RTS staff to Frost Giant and will likely never release another RTS again. Sure they can probably survive on lootboxes for Hearthstone and Overwatch, but it's not the company it was. Even WoW is basically dead and is just rehashing with classic. Diablo got turned into mobile lootbox garbage as well, and it's too early to tell if Diablo 4 is going to follow the same path, but I wouldn't hold out hope on it being a critical success.
Large game companies have now essentially become casinos.
This created a massive new risk that is now getting priced in. prices are probably going to jump for a decade because of it, and maybe permanently if politicians decide to do another eviction moratorium for some reason.
Everything I've ever seen seems to back up that people with the most debt that aren't doctors did so due to bad decisions. In most cases some or all of the following are true: never got a degree, went to out of state or private school, took 5+ years to get a bachelors degree, or signed for as many loans as possible each semester.
The why can be really important though. We do X because Google does it, or something like that is often a red flag because they have some insanely convoluted process that they don't need. knowing that things are selected that fit the size and scale of where a company is or will be soon is important.
The biggest reason I don't like Costco is that it really isn't cheaper than other bulk clubs, or grocery stores for that matter other than Whole Foods or other "premium" stores. Costco has higher prices because they slap organic/non-gmo/free range/etc. labels on most products and the markup isn't worth any perceivable quality increase. The low SKU and frequent rotation of products is also frustrating because I can't count on staples being available, so it also caused more trips elsewhere to find everything I actually need.
Yes it really is a big deal, and it would require a pretty significant increase in the size of the House of Representatives. The increase would need to be in the range of 690-900 to really see any effect tough. What this does is reduce the power of lobbying as each rep is now roughly half as valuable, but a lobbyist can't really see and work with twice as many reps. More reps also further reduces the chance that electoral college and popular vote ever differ. The power of money in elections would also be reduced simply due to the massive increase in people seeking funds compared to the amount of money available to raise for elections.
It's not really even news arguably. The rates have more than doubled in less than a year. That simply removed about 100k of buying power from anyone getting a mortgage.
The mortgage market has changed a lot as a result of 2008. It's harder to end up underwater now with requirements for less biased appraisals, actual income, and actual assets. The other thing to note is that even in 2008 almost every home in the country had recovered to above 2008 prices within 5 years. Buying a house without a reasonable confidence of living 5 years in that home is taking a big risk.
At the poorest levels wages are slowest to increase due to inflation, and there aren't cheaper beans and rice to buy at the grocery store. At the mid levels, maybe a cost of living raise eats half the current inflation, and switching to cheaper brand items can make up the difference. At the highest levels some may see inflation beating raises, have inflation protected assets, and have disposable income so inflation maybe means not going out to eat as much or not getting a new car.
I prefer an old professors definition of AI, "Computer research in commercially non-viable solutions." Anything AI discovers that is useful becomes rebranded into some other tech. Machine learning is the most recent thing that's starting to break out of the AI umbrella.
While this is the common shorthand, what actually happened is pretty different. The ruling is people don't lose their rights when acting as a group. John Smith, Girl Scout troop#2365, and Bank Of America are all equally protected to create and publish a Pro or anti politician message. There isn't really a law that can just say money isn't speech, because that doesn't change anything.
They only killed universal free lunch, not the means tested part. Poorer kids are still getting free lunches and now the richer families have to pay for school lunches. They ended welfare for the wealthy.
Isn't that playing a little loose with definitions? if you have 10 "repetitions" that don't need to change simultaneously they aren't really repetitions in the first place. Just because a dumb analyzer says you have a 10 line block of identical code in 10 places doesn't mean it's actually identical.
DevOps has pivoted I think from the more original goal of having Devs do a lot of Ops things. This isn't really a viable solution as almost every compliance system mandates the people writing code and the people deploying/running systems are different.
What we have now is Ops that use things like source control. Write scripts that are more modular, reusable and composable. A new application can have cloud resources created and allocated in a day rather than a month of tickets to several other teams. This is also granting visibility to things that Ops may have been doing, but it was scripts on a PC or build server that only Ops had access to.
Fats were far more prevalent in the 70s and 80s though. Many recipes called for lard, shortening, butter, or tallow. Food was also far less processed, featuring less added sugars or other carbs that have been added for appearance or shelf stability reasons.
if you are expecting a DEvOps guy to know C#/Java/C++ and all the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff, you want a unicorn. That person is also definitely not going to put up with a 4hr test.
If you want a senior DevOps person that knows the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff write a basic test for that and don't test them on stuff they don't really need to know.
If you can afford the house you are buying and like the house then it's worth it. If rates drop in 6 months you can always refinance, if prices fall you still have a house.
Building was paused for about a year (Covid and lumber prices), so there are a ton of new builds that didn't happen or got delayed. New Construction was already barely keeping up or falling behind pre-pandemic. Covid also caused a massive swing in what was desirable housing, small city apartments are a lot less attractive when lockdowns were possible so demand moved to places that weren't prepared for it.
what makes a second home a luxury? What if my parents died and I inherit their house while I own one? Do I lose one, or have a grace period to sell one?
What if I own a family farm and want to build a new modern house on some of the property? Do I need to demolish the old one, sell it, be homeless to build a new one?
Trying to time a market always fails, and a first house isn't really an investment in the traditional sense. It's always the best time to buy first home, from a market perspective. The big factor is picking somewhere you plan to live for 5+ years.
Lack of construction workers is also holding things back, this could be a lit of a licensing issue, but there aren't enough workers to do all the projects that are funded now.
The prices not being public is a problem, but really the big issue is the indirection in payments. No one really knows how much is getting paid to an insurance company for their insurance, and no one really knows how much an insurance company is paying out. Anyone that actually knows these numbers is isolated (and often hidden) from the patient and doctor.