Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

@mentallyalex Oh yeah, from a sociological standpoint, it's fascinating. Also, it feels like a lot of those kinds of systems can be predatory, and astrology always felt pretty benign by comparison.

@mentallyalex There are Tarot card reading businesses around me, so that kind of stuff is definitely still a thing (granted, Florida caveat, but still). I think (?) newspapers still do daily horoscopes too, don't they?

Personally, I put it in the same category as religion: just another attempt to find order in the chaos of life.

@freemo Right, but when you do it explicitly, (a) it's like an extended interview, and (b) during this period you can avoid the W2s and some of the onboarding overhead, in case you choose not to hire them.

@freemo Yep, here, check it out, I just took this picture in my back porch storage room where the wall is bare:

And this is *common* around here.

@freemo @Gbudd It was built in the 1950s, so not quite 100 years. The construction is cinder block and asbestos-filled drywall. Both last quite a long time. Most of the electric fixtures have been replaced (lights, etc.), and there are some rooms that were clearly extensions built later, but the main windows are clearly from the original house (they're single-pane and have the old-school handle-latches, and a couple just won't open anymore). The bathroom has clearly been remodeled at some point more recently, but even then, it has no exhaust fan and the main plumbing is still the original cast iron built into the foundation.

The entire neighborhood is in a similar condition. As I understand it, this is just how it is in most of the country right now, but Florida is a little worse than average.

@freemo @Gbudd Not really. I paid almost $200K for it in 2020, so it's probably worth at least 50% more than that now.

That's not much cheaper than a comparable house, which is *exactly why* these don't get upgraded: The upgrades cost way more than the value they add to the house. It's a losing proposition.

@freemo @Gbudd Dude, I literally live in one of those houses. Asbestos. Cloth-wrapped wires. Even the air system is like 25 years old. No insulation; just drywall on cinderblocks. The roof is newer, but that's about it.

Few places in America require older buildings to be up to code. Most places only require that for new construction.

@freemo Oh wow. Yeah, as I understand it, most of what we understand as "seeing" nebulas in pictures is really like x-ray spectrum or something shifted into our visible color spectrum. So, in natural light viewing, they're mostly just slightly darker patches of the sky.

@freemo @Gbudd The problem with *that* reasoning is that many of the houses we have in this country *were* built that long ago.

The house I own was built in the 1950s and it still cost six figures, despite the fact that it still has asbestos and cloth-wrapped wires (thanks Florida!).

@freemo Right, but you'd need special telescopes to see the nebula, right? And, even at its brightest, a supernova would still be nothing more than a point of light to the naked eye.

Whereas, if you take away your "unaided" requirement, you could absolutely live that dream. Pretty sure we've seen several in our lifetime that just require serious magnification to view.

@mentallyalex @TonyStark Oh my god, can we make a game of it? Go sign up for Truth Social accounts and plant the most ridiculous replacement conspiracies to see which one gains the most traction?

I'll go start one where Smirnov was actually a mermaid who got plastic surgery to look like us and push the Atlantean agenda on puny human politics.

@freemo I wonder how much of that is driven by his own domestic support base crumbling... Maybe he *needs* global stability right now to shore up his own power, far more than he did before the Ukraine invasion.