Since women commonly claim not to care too much about length (or actively prefer not too long) and choose a pretty average size in studies, I’ll stop worrying about it until penis fencing becomes a thing.
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I started at UT in '88 and lived in Austin until '02, when we moved up here. What you’ve described sounds like deja vu all over again: It seemed like the city went through all this before, after Slacker (then Dazed and Confused) came out; MTV did a Real World episode there (or I may be conflating it with Austin Stories); Clint Eastwood and Johnny Depp did a couple of movies etc. I remember in '94 or '95, when the new phone books came out, someone who had actually lived there for, if not his entire life, then at least since childhood, glumly pointed out that we now had two phone books (one white, one yellow). Then, Les Amis closed, to be replaced with a Starbucks.
As for the suburbs, I worked at IBM and it seemed like most of my co-workers lived much further afield, at a time when IBM itself was still out in the sticks. A lot of them lived in Round Rock, some were as far away as Killeen or Burnet (or, from clear across town in the other direction, San Marcos). My impression of Round Rock was that it could not be much more culturally different from Austin (for example), while I never lived any further north than Koenig Lane, and swore I’d never move further north than Anderson nor further south than Ben White, since anything outside wasn’t “Austin Austin.”
ETA: I guess in previous years the housing/real estate didn’t boom that much (compared to now), but this is based purely on personal experience: I had the same duplex for 8 years, I think it was $405 or $425 when I moved in (and I was making less than $20k/year) and it was $495 when I left in 2002.
As it turned out, we moved to the D.C. area, anyway. Back in Austin, my wife-to-be had a house in what was then a brand-new neighborhood off Parmer; the value went up in the 3.5 years that she had it, and we put the proceeds into a similar, slightly older house up here (which was about $75k more at the time). I think some of the houses on our street (here) may have gone for $500k or $600k during the bubble, but I’d guess they’re more like $300k or $400k now. I just checked on her old Austin address and, while the value went up, according to Zillow it’s only $25-30k more than she sold it for almost 14 years ago. I’m surprised as it’s nearly within spitting distance of Dell and Samsung.
P.S. I’m not sure I had a point, but forgot to mention that now I’m not so sure whether we’ll be moving back. We’ve grown pretty attached to Maryland even though we’ve yet to find a decent breakfast taco.
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You’re probably safe; even the tallest penis fences don’t keep a dog from escaping your yard—or a neighbor from seeing your penis.
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Great, now I feel inferior with my little picket fence.
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Location location location. If I lived near my folks in the desert of Southern California, I’d be scraping the bottom. But, in the rural midwest (where we have groundhogs in the yard!) I see the light at the end of the tunnel on the mortgage, hoping for a 2017 payoff. Admittedly, the house is 120 years old, and not big or fancy, but the idea of owning a home outright is motivating me to get it paid off ahead of schedule. It was going to be 2021, but I am READY!
The flip side is that if we sell this house and move to California, we could buy a car, but that’s about it. I don’t always love it here, but the day the mortgage goes away, I’m gonna kiss the ground we live on. It would never have been possible anywhere more expensive, which is everywhere.
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I’m earning above $90K and live in a fairly cheap St. Louis suburb. I’ve had offers for employment on the West Coast for less
But this is after many years of earning less than $50K, being moderately in debt, and having $15K a year in recurring medical expenses. My spouse works part-time. So overall we don’t have much of a buffer of savings for emergencies or retirement. We’re in the top 25% for household income but are not really secure – that is pretty much dependent on how the political winds blow.
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This, exactly. The definition of “middle class” used to be based on the idea of stability: not just how much someone made at their current job, but the fact that their career and neighborhood were both stable and not likely to be ripped out from under them at a moment’s notice. It meant a family could plan for the future, not live paycheck to paycheck.
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Yup, the residential real estate market in the US has been globalized in a way. If we do have a prolonged economic downturn and elect some form of Trump populist I am pretty sure they will crack down on the corporate home ownership with high taxes, particularly targeting the owners of US RE who are from “oil nations” and Chinese.
It wasn’t a serious comment. But I would suggest that someone suffering dissatisfaction with their own body may not care what other people think or prefer - and observe that ‘average’ may be an impossible dream for up to half of the sample or population.
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The upper class is composed of royalty, aristocracy and landed clergy. 2% of the population.
The middle class is composed of merchants and unlanded clerics (academics being a subset of clerics, tradesmen and barbers being a subset of merchants). 5% to 15% of the population.
The lower class is composed of peasants, serfs and villains.
Yeomen are an occasionally armed lower class that have been convinced they are not serfs.
Look, it’s right in my username, OK?
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