u/lottiexx

Read an article in The Economist yesterday about the global housing crisis. More of the same stuff - supply shortages, interest rates, investor demand all valid points. but there was zero mention of one issue that's been bugging me lately: how local planning rules actively work against adding density. Not just nimbyism but actual zoning overlays, height restrictions, character requirements. Stuff that's baked into council systems and makes it genuinely hard to build.

the supply debate feels incomplete without talking about these planning barriers. anyone else think this gets overlooked?

I'm a realtor. I work with sellers. To find them, I cold call homeowners in target neighborhoods. I make about 50 calls a day. And I get maybe 1 or 2 conversations out of those. Most people don't pick up. Those who do are annoyed to hear from me. My reputation suffers every time I call

I am desperate now. But I see that DropCowboy offers ringless voicemail. As simple as that like no rings and no interruptions. You have to record your voice, clone it by using AI and send a personalized message to voicemail

It seems like a breakthrough but something worries me about it. First, it looks like cheating and I’m not calling someone… I’m leaving a cloned message. And what will happen after people notice that it is not an actual call? Secondly, are there any legal aspects? Is this technology legal? Are telemarketing laws applicable here?

What I’m looking for is a method that allows reaching sellers without bothering them. But it seems to me that I may cross some lines here

Have you used ringless voicemail and/or AI voice cloning in real estate? Did it help you find some sellers or was it rather counterproductive? I am desperately in need of an honest piece of advice

Well… to start with I wanna say that I’ve noticed that people hear "inherited a mansion" and think you hit the jackpot. But I wanna say from my own experience that it's not that simple

My grandparents did well for themselves and left me their house after they passed. When I say house, I mean a huge place way outside the city. Sounds like a dream from the outside. But I've built my own life separately. I have my own career, my own mortgage, my family. We're happy living our own lives

The main issue I guess is that I work in the city and some days I leave way too late, and the last thing I want is a two-hour drive in the dark just to take care of an enormous property I never planned my life for. My kids love their schools, and I'm not going to uproot them

On top of that, the place isn't turnkey. My grandparents had financial issues later in life and deferred a lot of maintenance. Now it's this huge property that needs a ton of work and costs money just sitting there

I listed it almost 2 years ago and I really thought that someone would jump at it. But most people think it's too far from the city, or the place is way too big and requires high maintenance. One couple wanted to turn it into a boutique hotel and then backed out at the last minute

At this point, I'm exhausted. I just want to sell it, put something into savings, pay down my mortgage, and build college funds for my kids the way my grandparents helped me

Lately I've been looking into companies like ready door homes that buy places for cash. Just so I can finally close this chapter and move on with my life. I'm hopeful this could be the fresh start I need

Has anyone else dealt with a similar situation?

Standard tutorial: movement, core mechanic, one combat encounter. Testers get through it fine in the moment, then forget a key input the second something stressful happens later.

Not sure if it's teaching too much at once, or not reinforcing the mechanic again shortly after. Anyone solved this and what fixed it?

had my identity stolen last year. someone tried to open a credit card. since then ive frozen my credit with all three bureaus and set up fraud alerts.

but im still getting alerts. not new accounts opened but like weird inquiries. someone checking my info. stuff like that. i know freezing credit stops new accounts but it doesnt stop people from using my existing info for other stuff. tax fraud, medical fraud, all that. ive been trying to figure out what else i can do. someone told me to check people search sites like whitepages and spokeo. my address and phone number are on there. apparently thats how scammers piece together profiles to commit fraud.

anyone else dealt with this. freeze credit. check data brokers. what else am i missing. feels like im doing everything right but still getting alerts.

had a call today that just broke me. customer calls in she's nice enough at first. asks about her bill. I explain it to her she says okay. I explain it again in a different way she says okay. I ask if she has any questions she says no. thank you hangs up.

ten minutes later she calls back. different agent gets her she's furious nobody explained her bill. she's been overcharged. she wants to speak to a manager.

I get pulled into the call because I'm the senior person. she's screaming at me now. I pull up the notes from the first call. I can see exactly what I told her. I can see the transcript because our phone system logs everything. it records everything. I literally have her saying okay I understand on the first call.

I try to explain this to her. she says nobody told me anything I'm like. ma'am I have a recording of the conversation. she says well I don't remember that. okay but it happened.

I don't even know what to do at this point. I can't argue with someone who just denies reality. I ended up just apologizing and giving her a small credit because it was easier than fighting.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. or maybe I've already lost it and just haven't noticed.

anyone else dealing with people who just. forget everything you say the second the call ends

Not every goal deserves to stick. Curious what you tried, gave up on, and never looked back — versus what you dropped and now regret.

For me it was journaling every morning. Forced it for months, hated every minute, dropped it with zero guilt. Meanwhile I quit running for a year and really wish I hadn't.

What'd you drop, good or bad call?

looking at gyms around DC and honestly it's ridiculous. like 150+ a month for a basic membership? I can't justify it anymore

I've been thinking about just building out a home setup instead. I don't have heaps of space (DC apartment life lol) but I figure I can make something work

anyone else in DC done the switch to home workouts? what gear do you use? I don't wanna drop cash on stuff that just collects dust lol

honestly the sheer amount of finance bros on twitter flexing their 400% gains on random tech stocks was really getting to my head this week. I was genuinely about to liquidate a chunk of my VOO just to try and catch a swing trade because I felt like I was missing out

Thank god I decided to scratch the itch using a trading game first instead of using my actual savings. Spoiler alert: my "instincts" are absolute garbage. I got chopped to pieces by volatility in like two days of fake trading

It was honestly the best reality check ever. The stress of constantly staring at 5-minute candles is so toxic and exhausting. Im just gonna keep dumping my paycheck into broad market etfs and let the algorithm do the work. boring really is better tbh

Something about 4X games and the observation that they punish losing but not winning badly stuck with me. It points at a broader problem. Most rulesets are built around a binary endpoint. You win or you lose, and everything between those two states is just transit. But some of the most interesting decisions in any game happen in the middle, when you're ahead but fragile, or behind but not out. The question is whether the rules actually register that difference.

Chess gets close. Being up material means nothing if your position is structurally weak. The board state carries meaning beyond the score. But most digital games flatten this. Your resource count goes up, your odds improve, and the game just waits for you to reach the finish line.

What I keep wondering is whether positional fragility can be designed in deliberately, not as a catchup mechanic, not as rubberbanding, but as a structural property of the system. Where holding a dominant position creates its own pressures that require active management, and where a player who leads sloppily is genuinely exposed in ways the ruleset makes legible.

I don't think this is just a 4X problem. It shows up in deckbuilders, in wargames, in tabletop RPGs where the party gets too powerful too early. Has anyone seen a ruleset that actually solves this at the mechanical level rather than just gesturing at it through difficulty scaling?

Woke up this morning to a backed up kitchen sink that refusing to drain no matter what i try. Tried a plunger and some hot water/dish soap but no luck, and don't want to mess it up worse with chemical drain cleaners since the pipes in this house are pretty old (built around 1978). Looking for someone local and fair who won't charge a lot just to come out and snake a line. Any solid recommendations around arvada that you guys actually trust?

I started reading first thing before opening my laptop. Just 20 pages, no goal other than finishing the chapter. Within a couple weeks I noticed I was less reactive to the first email of the day and more willing to sit with a problem instead of immediately trying to fix it. Cycling helped too. I would read on the train then ride home without my phone, and the ideas from the book would keep turning over while I pedaled. It was small and boring, but it gave me something to return to when everything felt urgent. I also stopped finishing books that bored me halfway through, which felt wasteful at first but kept the habit from turning into another obligation. Curious if anyone else built a reading routine around their actual schedule instead of trying to force it into an already full day.

Swear to god trying to commute in to town right now feels like driving through an active artillery range. The council patches a hole with what looks like literal wet sand, we get a bit of frost, and suddenly there's a foot-deep trench just waiting to snap your control arms in the morning fog

Hit an absolute monster of a pothole yesterday and genuinely thought my whole front left wheel fell off. the amount of vehicle damage we just accept as "normal" regional driving is insane.

Local mechanics are booked out for literally weeks right now so I just gave up. Grabbed the replacement bits from road runner offroad on my phone and im just gonna spend my whole sunday freezing on the concrete trying to bolt it all together myself

is it just me or is the local road maintenance just completely non-existent lately? feel like we pay rates just to slowly destroy our own cars tbh

doing aerial hoop for a bit now and i'm having trouble with my leggings. they keep sliding around on the metal and it's making things harder than they need to be lol. tried a few different pairs and some are way too slippery, others have too much grip. i need something that's in between. i've heard that cotton blend stuff works better but honestly i'm just guessing at this point.

someone at the studio mentioned Energetiks for dancewear and said their leggings have good grip. i'm thinking of trying them but wanted to see if anyone here has experience with them for hoop.

also wondering about bodysuits cause i see people wearing them and they look super practical. no waistband to deal with and no shirt riding up

just got a fresh batch of my regular skincare staples. I picked up a few things after stopping by all saints clinic last week to restock on what I was running low on.

got a new bottle of the beauty of joseon glow replenish milk since my skin has been loving it lately, plus a basic gentle moisturizer for the evening.

always so satisfying opening new bottles when everything runs out at the exact same time. what skincare products did you guys restock on recently?

I chose the option that worked for food delivery out of the possibilities available. paid, received the code, and placed a supper order. Nothing out of the ordinary, but at the time, it was incredibly practical. Do you guys ever utilize cryptocurrency for routine tasks like this?

flew into JFK last night for a work trip and decided to grab an uber like i always do. the ride to midtown was $110. NOT even surge pricing (or so they claimed lol). i swear it used to be like $70-80 even with tip. when did it jump this much

my colleague who lives in nyc said i shouldve booked a car service to JFK in advance instead, apparently its actually cheaper now if u plan ahead and you get a nicer car too. i looked it up and yeah, for my return trip on friday i can get a luxury sedan for like $95 flat rate. how is that LESS than uber

is anyone else noticing this? feel like the whole point of uber was supposed to be cheaper than traditional car services but now its literally flipped

Saw a listing near ottawa today. 3 beds, 1 bath, basement looks like it literally floods every spring, and the kitchen hasn't been touched since 1998

They want 850k firm

like... what universe are we living in?? I get that everyone wants a return on their investment but treating a crumbling bungalow like it's a turnkey luxury estate is just insulting at this point. I ran the address through broko just to check the comps and the actual estimate is closer to 580

looked at the history and of course they bought it at the absolute peak in early 2022 for 800 and are just desperately trying to pass the bag to some poor FTHB

this market is so draining man. Just needed to vent cause honestly my eyes rolled so far back into my head looking at those listing photos they almost got stuck

Almost every game treats information as a pure positive. You learn how the system works, you gain an edge, you win more. The ruleset never turns knowledge against you.

But there's an interesting design space where being informed closes doors instead of opening them. Not through some arbitrary fog of war mechanic, but structurally. A negotiation game where declaring your strategy early locks other players into counterpositions you now have to navigate. A political sim where your reputation as a competent actor means opponents coordinate against you in ways they never would against a weaker player. The player who knows the most is also the most legible, and being legible has costs.

Tabletop RPGs get close to this occasionally. If your character is known as an expert in something, NPCs start treating you as a resource or a threat, not a neutral party. But it's usually handled through fiction rather than rules, so it's inconsistent.

The question I keep sitting with is whether any ruleset has actually formalized this tension at the mechanical level, where acquiring information or expertise is a real strategic commitment with structural consequences, not just flavor. And if that's rare, is it because it's genuinely hard to make feel fair, or because players just don't want it.