Not wrong. I combined my truck and SUV budget and bought a used X7 m50i and a small utility trailer. No joke it's the best pulling vehicle I have ever owned. Super heavy, super grippy, in trailer mode the torque comes on fast. It's brilliant. My old 03 Silverado sits even more now.
It's pretty economical. Towing about halves your range. So you're still paying quite a low gallons/mile equivalent. However, that decreased range is a killer. So it makes sense why you'd see them doing lighter duty local work like landscaping.
I have a champion tri-fuel that cost < $1k which runs essentially my whole house. It's plumbed into my natural gas so as long as that is up (it has never gone out), I don't even have to refill it.
I read somewhere that it's a big deal if a natural gas network runs out of gas because then air can get into the system. That can lead to explosions, so they have to systematically purge the entire network.
We have the same. $2K generator, while house transfer switch, natural gas hookup. Guess we'll never have a power failure again, since we just got a new generator.
re commerical buildings today, absolutely. Most developments, especially retail ones have the goal of being wrapped up in a commerical real estate portfolio. That might be a REIT or held by a private investor. Their goal is to collect buildings with the widest marketability for retail. They are not generally curating locations with intent. Though some owners specialize in that in high density tourist or luxury retail spaces.
To be fair, this isn't entirely new. The American West was strewn with cheap wooden structures that all looked alike with big fake fonts with hand painted signs. Those mostly rotted so they're uncommon in our lexicon outside of movies.
Very much. However I've lived in both over the years. Both need to be torn down and replaced! There are a lot of practical things that anyone who has compared living in a house built in 2026 vs something older will not like.
Of course building a new house is expensive. There are a lot of sunk costs in an existing house and generally while there is a lot to not like about an old house, in generally keeping it and doing small remodels to make it better is a better use of money even though ideally you would replace it.
Dude, it's labor. It is no coincidence that essentially every intricate form of architecture gave way to simplified forms at the exact same time that wages for trade workers were rapidly rising.
Hand placed parquet that took a master craftsman several weeks to lay disappeared. Intricate carvings upon otherwise utilitarian and common structures likewise.
Art Deco itself is a compromise with this creeping reality. Not fully modern minimalist but economically efficient in using flattened elements, prefabs and striaght accents for detailing.
When a trad person posts their diatribe online it is a simple tell. They know next to nothing about how the built world is actually created. And they don't understand how wages came to form the basis of respect for working people. The act of decrying the utilitarian transition is itself a form of disrespect via ignorance. Because what you are essentially saying is that your aesthetic preferences are more important than the time of expert laborers, whether you know it or not.
Counterpoint, a relative of mine works in a sector where he sees a lot of luxury villas (we're from Tuscany, so it's full of wealthy oligarchs on the coast). I've seen some of the photos and I'd say none of them look good to me, they're just modernist regular shaped blocks of something that makes a house, and inside the kitchiest decorations possible just to flaunt money. And yet, they could afford to pay for any style they wanted
As a privacy and security focused company, this would seem like reputational suicide. Which in the privacy and security space you would figure is basically corporate suicide.
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