Don’t worry. This is just the future timeline that Scrooge is seeing. Eventually he will mend his ways, and Marley will no longer die on stage.

Sure. I remember reading the concept somewhere, perhaps in an old r/asksciencefiction thread. I didn’t come up with it originally.

I don’t believe in ghosts or psychic phenomena, but I do love the concept in fiction that ghosts aren’t actual human souls. Rather, they’re a sort of psychic “burn in.” If a living person experiences strong emotions, such as a prolonged period of grieving, or the incredible emotional intensities that come with being murder victim, those emotions can become embedded within a place. Do you grieve for a deceased partner, mourning for years, remembering key moments over and over? A reflection of that grief becomes embedded within reality in the location you experienced those emotions. When you die or leave, someone else can come into that place and experience a recording, a reflection, or echo of the emotions and memories you experienced.

Ghosts are effectively traumatic memories burned in to the fabric of the world. They don’t actually experience anything; they’re not conscious beings. They’re not souls looking to complete their business and move on. They’re simply psychic echoes. They’re imprints left on reality from very intense and painful emotions, particularly those experienced repeatedly over a long period of time.

This also explains why ghosts have a half life. Ever wonder why in the US, all the ghosts seem to be old timey white people from the 1800s or similar? Considering the total number of Native Americans that must have lived in what is now the US down the millennia, the vast, vast majority of ghosts should be Native American. But aside from the classic example of a disturbed native burial ground, Native American ghosts don’t show up much in fiction. It’s usually old timey white people.

The reason for this, in the imprint theory, is that like any imprint, ghosts tend to fade with time. Just as most footprints will slowly be eroded, the knots in the psychic fabric that ghosts represent slowly work themselves out over time. The ghosts people do experience tend to be from the last century or two, as most ghosts older than that have decayed below the level of human perception.

The self-driving taxis and humanoid robots companies like Tesla are developing are just a thinly disguised way of getting around immigration law. We’re a very long way away from having autonomous humanoid robots that can clean your house for you. But one remotely piloted by someone in Bangladesh wearing a haptic suit? If the tech was cheap enough, that sort of thing would be profitable.

It’s effectively an extremely perverse and exploitive form of immigration. When we bring immigrants in, they typically take low-level jobs. But they also get opportunities to advance themselves further. Moreover, in the US at least, any children immigrants have on US soil automatically become US citizens. So yes, immigrants come in on the bottom of the social ladder, but they have an opportunity to climb.

Here though? This is a way of getting all the labor we want from immigrants but without offering them the usual deal in return. And even worse, they won’t even be owed minimum wage.

Unethical life pro tip: get an apartment that isn’t at the end of a hallway and has floors above and below. In some cases, you can turn off your heat completely and simply steal heat from your neighbors, leeching off of them like some sort of thermal mosquito. It won’t be as warm as is comfortable without bundling up, but it may be warm enough to get by just by bundling up. Watch out for freezing pipes though!

For an added techno bonus: install a smart thermostat connected to a camera pointed at the door with facial recognition tech built in. If anyone other than the residents walk in, the thermostat is automatically reset to 72F/22C. That way if you DO burst a pipe, and the landlord walks in, they won’t have any proof you did it!

The War of the Tiger Kings.

Maybe. On a completely unrelated note, can you let me know the next time you’ll be in public, preferably not standing within several feet of anyone else and anything flammable?

To light things on fire with my mind.

My God in Heaven. It WAS aliens all along. A UFO intercepted Earhart’s plane and turned it to stone with a space ray! Or, possibly, a wizard did it.

Shame. Shame upon you!

https://timecube.online/

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

You missed the point. My point is that even if you buy stock on 100% equity, 0 margin trading, you still are investing on margin. You are investing on margin because those company stocks you are buying themselves used these leverage techniques in their own operations.

Even then though, it’s not as amazing as it seems. Real estate is not the only sector that can make profits on leverage. In fact, pretty much any publicly traded company relies on leverage and debt. If you buy a share of an index fund, you’re buying shared of companies, most of them taking advantage of the same leverage you would when buying a rental property.

Meanwhile, we’re a third through a 15 year mortgage locked in at 2.5% for the life of the loan. If we had been willing to pay a bit higher in interest, we could have locked in a 30 year mortgage rate, probably around 3%.

Because markets aren’t perfectly rational. If they were perfectly efficient, no company would ever be able to make a profit at all. But we don’t live in that perfect Econ 101 world, and companies can make profits because inefficiencies exist in the economy. As such, sometimes rent can be more expensive than owning.

That’s true in general. And if you assume a perfectly efficient market, yes, renting would never be cheaper than buying. On the other hand, if markets were perfectly efficient, no company would ever be able to make a profit at all.

One market distortion is that in certain times, people will actually pay a premium for renting. People aren’t perfectly rational actors. Or moreover, they prioritize things beyond just simple cost. Even if buying is more expensive that renting, all costs considered, often people will pay more just for the stability and certainty that comes with home ownership.

The housing market is also distorted by all the present owners with locked-in 30-year mortgages. This has suppressed the supply of existing homes on the market. Rental companies don’t get access to federally-subsidized 30 year mortgages, so they are less subject to this interest rate lock-in.

I pointed out a few things, but these are a few of many. The key thing to realize is that housing is highly illiquid, and its production, ownership, and sale is heavily regulated, taxed, and subsidized. It’s a heavily regulated market. This means that the market will not always follow basic econ 101 behavior. Yes, in theory, rentals will include all costs. But that is rarely the case.

In fact, in a perfectly efficient market, it’s likely that neither buying nor renting would be beneficial. If everyone acted perfectly rationally all the time, the cost of renting would exactly equal the cost of buying. And in that world, buying would never be worth it, simply because it wouldn’t be worth the extra hassle to safe not a single penny.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

But I only got into woodworking after I met my husband!

3 of these guys marching down the street: a joke.

3,000 of these guys marching down the street: a nightmare.