Prove_your_argument

So your comment is less than nothing… you haven’t said absolutely anything other than pointing out you couldn’t be bothered to read the comment chain.

For the “It’s not a realtors job anyways” to do title searches, that’s what I called out to avoid useless comments about it here https://piefed.social/post/2082718/comment/11442844/reply

I do realize I pointed out something with mortgages that is only tangentally related to realtors, but my point is that many levels of the process are a problem from leeches trying to get their cut of the big fat fucking pie.

I understand that TODAY the title search process is a total shitshow because of a bunch of disparate data sources, so you need someone to track things down. I’ve never done a title search personally because that’s not my job, i’m a tech worker though and understand how technology works.

Zero reason why this couldn’t be in a database somewhere at a nationwide level and mandatory for real estate transactions. It might take years to do the transition, but it could be done. It could have been started in 2008 when the market crashed as part of mortgage reform and already be here today, 18 years later… but it wasn’t.

It’s like turbotax and all the tax preparers stopping us from moving to another option, because they lobby the government to avoid changing it so they can keep money. It’s a racket. The government already has the data sources to know what your transactions were. For most people who are W2 employees without special circumstances they know everything without you needing to input it.

Any time there’s a big money transaction the bullshit leeches come in and try to make a living off of a niche specialty because their payday is a small portion of the overall transaction. It’s in nearly every single aspect of our lives. It’s the credit card processors, it’s the bank overdraft fees and minimum balance fees, it’s every house and auto transaction, it’s nearly every legal process. It’s in health insurance with MASSIVE contracts negotiated with any business of any real size out there. You name it, some bullshit exists to make you pay more. Just because it is the way it works today does NOT mean it needs to be the way it works in the future. If we just look at our problems and say “well that’s the way it works, and I won’t make more money by changing it” we’ll never improve anything.

So I don’t know the specifics here and I don’t doubt there is substantial environmental impact.

Do want to point out though that whenever my area has construction on water pipes we often have a flush water notice where we need to basically run our taps to flush out dirt and debris that got in during construction. Several pipes in my neighborhood were replaced in the past couple of years and we had to do it every few months. I could see that being the cause here too, if the neighborhoods are anywhere near said water pipe construction.

I do doubt the EPA will do jack about any of it. They might go out and do some survey and shake down the organization funding the work for a bribe, but there’s no way they’re gonna stop it if they pay up in those closed door conversations.

When employers are forced to pay us a % of revenue alongside our salary, then we’ll talk.

% based commissions on home sales incentivize rising home prices. They incentivize fast sales too, even if it may go contrary to the fiduciary duty they should have.

Many commission based jobs outside of art are bullshit, like auto salesmen. The whole homebuying process could be simplified with an online web form where a buyer and seller put in the information and automated systems handle the rest of the bullshit. Title search as a fee is a great example of something that makes NO SENSE in the 21st century… like most fees surrounding large purchases where they double check you’re a real human with a real job on the date of closing the deal. All that shit could be centralized and done for pennies on the dollar. Zero value add for the majority of the process. Any bullshit red tape a realtor may or may not navigate is a sign of poor process which could be changed. I do realize I pointed out something with mortgages that is only tangentally related to realtors, but my point is that many levels of the process are a problem from leeches trying to get their cut of the big fat fucking pie.

Someone could still be paid by the hour to stage homes and schedule open houses without the commission. If all you’re doing is looking for open houses it really should be no more than finding somebody on fiverr or taskrabbit… or just a fucking filter for zillow, redfin or whatever website.

Anyone who makes a living from a role like a realtor - of which there are MANY out there - will be against practically everything i’ve said. I don’t expect upvotes, I expect to be dog piled. There’s reality and what people want to believe though, and the reality is that most of the process is bullshit to give a giant fat commission for people able to pull a fast one on unsuspecting buyers and sellers.

Morons or masters of revenue?

We all hate it, but for every one of us who will cancel there’s ten more who will just keep paying no matter how bad it gets.

Just takes one show and a lack of motivation to self host a solution, and these companies own every popular show and nearly the entire pipeline of creation.

Advertisements work so well everybody is trying to put them everywhere to make more money. It’s just that simple. Reddit is effectively full vertical video and photo content if you browse the site without logging in, because a few second video format is enough to slip in a quick ad without triggering people as much as a long format ad does, like infomercials of yore.

If we want the ads gone we need to regulate them away.

They take sceenshots and use ml to summarize segments of activity probably

Clearly my user story about my experience is completely invalid as a factor. Good to know.

Edit: you guys are really insufferable.

I’m not alone about motion sickness, which is dubbed cyber sickness with vr headsets apparently. >50% experience this, with >20% having severe reactions. This is a small study but it’s not the only one with similar results and there are no large scale studies disproving this that I could find, but maybe you can if you want to be right and put in the effort! I spent about 50 hours in total using VR headsets and I can confirm almost every session had a reaction for me, and a couple of times I had to stop from JUST this. My ex girlfriend tried for a bit and she also had it worse. A very small scale study at northeastern says women makes claims that women have a higher rate for this as well, but you can do your own research.

It’s widely known that you need custom prescription lenses if you are nearsighted because most modern VR headsets are unable to match common prescriptions with the focus options available. These headsets are designed to make things appear far away in general, so if you need glasses to see at a distance you’ll need special lenses just for the headset you buy - these are not interchangeable between models from various manufacturers today. Many people like myself have astigmatism, so a simple lens like -2.00 will not just do the job, these need to be the same prescription as you would need for day to day glasses. These lenses are not functional for day to day use cases like driving, using a computer outside of VR, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaQuestVR/comments/1h3bffc/do_i_need_prescription_lenses/

I know some of you really love VR and think it’s the future. That’s great! Enjoy it! have a blast! pick up the frame on launch day! No one is going to stop you. For many of us, it’s not an option and we’re not interested because we’ve tired it ourselves multiple times with multiple headsets and games.

Congrats, i’m glad you like it and doesn’t give you the issues it gave me.

The headset I bought was the original HTC Vive, which was $800 at the time which adjusted for inflation would probably be close to $1500 today. At the time had a 1080ti which was the fastest gpu. I spared no expense, did drill in wall mounting and the whole nine yards, and devoted an entire room to it. Total waste of time, but glad I tried it to realize just how bad it was for me.

Zero practical consequence or effect here.

Windfarms produce clean energy with minimal environmental impact and cost.

VR headsets… don’t quite have the same kind of impact. You can easily spend $2000-$3000 and find that your purchase is not at all what you envisioned.

Windmills are exactly what they look like, cheap energy machines that will lower our total cost of energy and reliance on burning substances that people are literally killing each other over, including the current war partially to raise prices for the venezuelan spoils to make investment sense.

Ah yes, all those glasses people made for each and every car they ever drove! That was so inconvenient!

And the deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning just by driving early cars! OH MY GOD SO MANY DEAD. BILLIONS! more than have ever died before!

Cars didn’t give people migraines or require custom lenses to use.

They also get you from point A to point B and without them you had no other choices beyond a horse, bicycle or paying someone else to produce something.

VR gives you a headset you have to wear that is uncomfortable and the end result is that you see the game you’re playing on the screen in front of you.

We already have screens in front of us that we play games on.

This is more like a motorcycle in America. Nobody uses them really, so you have to really commit to it to get use out of it. There’s loads of downsides and the upsides is that it can be fun from time to time. They can technically take you from point a to point b, but odds are you’re gonna want something with walls and a roof when weather sucks or when you need to do something serious like haul some supplies for a home project. Just like how certain things are just better with a mouse and keyboard or with a controller.

Your car analogy fits computers or smartphones better. We already have those, so an accessory computing thing is a frivolous add on for most anything you’d want to do with it, but it can be fun if it works for you. Sure, in Asian countries bikes are cheaper and more common so everything is more suitable to them, but I suspect they will never catch on here to the same degree…. Like VR.

I knew VR would never pan out.

It needs expensive special equipment in the form of a headset that has no other use.

You need expensive powerful graphics hardware for good quality.

You need more special equipment if you wear glasses. Prescription lenses just for the goggles that are not used anywhere else.

It causes headaches, migraines and dizziness.

You need wide open space to utilize it.

I bought and returned a headset at the Microsoft store and am so glad I got that money back.

Just pull backups from the DOGE guys.

discovery of IT records is quite sophisticated

I’m in IT and I’ve worked for multinational companies with billions in revenue. Never seen a thorough discovery but many, many lawsuits and legal holds.

Nobody in IT tries to avoid providing information, but legal and the middlemen have absolutely no idea what data exists, where it exists, what the limitations are… half the time all they ask for are email records and file server records even though there may be texts somewhere, files on user systems or cloud shares that they never think to ask about… they rarely give us much information. We often aren’t even told what they are really looking for - we often just get a few keywords and a timeframe.

Haven’t seen external entities come in and comb through things either, and even if that existed they wouldn’t know where to look unless it’s documented - so things like old tapes, piles of hard drives in an ewaste pile and old backup appliances that are unplugged sitting in a server closet full of drives are totally unknown.

Plus if you know you will be sued there’s usually little reason to have retention longer than a year or two by policy for stuff like email and chat.

Then there’s all the messages sent by leadership in platforms outside of the company that nobody investigates, like WhatsApp or signal.

Maybe it’s different somewhere, but I just haven’t seen it yet.

Even if it’s put in writing, you’d need to sue them and go to discovery and then you’re relying on an IT team to “find xyz” from a request made by legal for discovery.

The odds of anyone ever pulling this off is nearly impossible, especially when the ones laid off all have to sign an indemnity clause against the company for that severance paycheck which says you won’t sue and will defend them in lawsuits in perpetuity. It would have to be one of the c-suite members in the meeting with written evidence, and the second you sue over that you’re blacklisted from ever getting an executive level role again.

That’s not how the conversation goes though.

Right now the conversation is mostly like “we need to cut costs to hit increased shareholder returns so I (the CEO) get my full bonus (which yours is similarly tied to), what are our options to not pay out severance?” Which the CHRO comes back with “RTO policies are great at cutting XX% and we will only have to hire back X% of roles and pay less for those roles and pay less for severance. We can also announce this is due to AI efficiencies and not poor revenue growth and get a bump to the shares we’ve already gotten from past compensation and make the board happy instead of seeing the typical drop in valuation associated with layoffs.”

It’s that simple.

Then there’s a handful of cases like my boss where they are enraged by WFH policies because he is incompetent (has been fired from past middle manager role for being inflexible and ineffective) and highly conservative. His measurement of performance is if your ass is in a chair or not, which doesn’t do much for a team’s performance which is why he has a job. He has been crusading to end remote work policies for all other fully remote departments to limited effect but has succeeded in getting a 1 day per week from his boss’ other teams.

You can’t tell me that every single one of the regulatory decisions by this administration that allowed a company to do something or benefitted an individual, company or industry were not the direct result of a literal bribe.

Pardons are an excellent example, aside from the J6ers. That was entirely PR for their wacko base. All those crypto bros convicted of shit that they pled guilty to? Come fucking on.

All the drug price regulations where they were going to negotiate ‘favored pricing’ have resulted in exemptions for the most profitable drugs for years - likely until the patents were going to fall off and they would be fucked by generics anyway. This is 100% pay to play. Give them a cut and you can fuck over the not-0.1% american people all day long, no matter what their political background is.

FCC later:

We’ve reviewed the ownership and can find no problems after receiving a hefty bribe.

That’s a lot of potatoes and moisture.