He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.

When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There’s a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.

These days, I don’t know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it’s become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I’m pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn’t legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.

I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.

It’s kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.

Genies are probably just super bored stuck in their magic lamps, have to get their entertainment when and where they can.

G as in gnosis.

Hey, now, that’s unfair to third world countries. Some of them actually have functioning public health systems.

I certainly wouldn’t say it’s trashy, but there are plenty of others who look down on it because they’re racist and/or insecure. Plenty of people will say stuff like “You’re in America, speak English!” if they hear someone having a conversation in another language. Hell, I grew up a monolingual English speaker and learned a couple other languages as an adult, and I’ll get dirty looks sometimes if I’m talking to my coworkers in Spanish, or my sister-in-law in Portuguese. Some people assume that if they show up, whether they’re part of the conversation or not, you have an obligation to switch to English as soon as you’re in their presence. There are a lot of ignorant people out their who try to mask their racism with a veneer of “proper etiquette” to force others to change language.

If I’m talking with my coworkers about what we’re going to eat for lunch, and someone gets pissy about hearing Spanish because they assume we must be talking shit about them, that’s not my problem.

Same. They already have my resume and application for the job, I’m not writing a whole page groveling and begging them to hire me.

Free Software Foundation

Not trying to be facetious, but you just kind of do it. I think it might be something that you just subconsciously keep track of once you really become aware of it. I remember it seeming like magic until I was maybe 15 or so, and then I had landmarks for each direction in my mental map and could figure things out in reference to them. After a bit of that, I could mostly stay oriented when traveling by land, and now it’s not an issue even when I fly somewhere. I went to England for the first time last year, and I had the cardinal directions sorted probably by the time I’d walked from the train to my hotel.

Once you’ve got it down, you just sort of do it on autopilot.