These things are a pain to use. Especially the cheap ones require more force than you'd expect and occasionally get stuck. They make a good clean cut but it's so slow and awkward that if you were wanting to do vandalism they're impractical relative to a reciprocating saw or better yet portable band saw.

I also wouldn't underestimate the power of spray paint, even though it's simple to fix it's still expensive when the contract specifics all the maintenance must be done by flock themselves.

Houston is too sprawled, even within Texas DFW has the bigger metropolitan population. It's just that DFW has some lines drawn in it separating the cities while in Houston they're all considered the same city.

That being said culturally it's definitely not DFW or Chicago. I think Miami is the clear 4th from its city size and unique culture, though I also can see the arguments for DC and SF.

The politicians have money and therefore usually live in Virginia rather than DC proper.

I'm convinced he likely has way, way more than his 16 claimed children.

4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don't see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of "just works". E-ink technology hasn't progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don't miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.

Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It's still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn't handle it even with the largest font.

Removing the income cap is the obvious first step to balancing the social security budget, but it's not enough to make the system solvent long term.

There are a number of ways to fix the remaining shortfall, but removing the cap is really the only easy measure and we can't even do that. All others involve some amount of pain. This interactive calculator is worth spending a bit messing with: https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/

It's scary how fast recurring costs add up. Little changes in lifestyle habit can genuinely make a big difference when added up over a year. One example of something surprisingly easy to cut down is electricity usage. It's also just expensive to be poor, so once you're over the hump of getting everything from the dollar tree and holding even a small balance on a credit card everything gets a lot easier.

As for rent I don't know how anyone gets by without a roommate anymore, but there's definitely no shame living with parents if you have that option. In most of the world multigenerational households are still normal, and considering rent is by far the biggest expense that's a huge shortcut to getting on track for retirement if available. I wouldn't feel guilt or shame for that, parents want to see you succeed and particularly if you're staying there to build savings or get out of debt that's more along the lines of something to be proud of.

I don't have Prime as well but shipping for orders over $35 is free. Since Amazon does the delivery themselves for anyone living in a city, I don't think it impacts the speed of arrival significantly either. Don't get me wrong, I don't order much and avoid Amazon when I can but it's not uncommon to find things which are 30%-40% cheaper there than anywhere else.

This used to be a thing but hasn't been for quite a while now to the best of my knowledge. It's hard to outcompete Amazon's logistics as a small seller, their whole store business operates at less than a 3% profit margin and they have scale to drive costs down which small sellers don't. They effectively subsidize the logistics with AWS, there's a reason Amazon became a monopoly after all.

When we do this my wife follows up with trimming if that I am broken and my opinion about her looks is invalid

Ya but property taxes are still significantly cheaper than rent, and most states have some exemption for a portion of the valuation your first home. The same doesn't apply to renters, and in many municipalities multifamily zoning has significantly higher property tax rates to begin with. Many conveniences of cities are built around homeowners since they're the majority of voters. In my old apartment despite trash at the property being taken by the city, apartment residents did not have access to the city dump for recycling and large trash items. Meanwhile residents owning a single family home did and could even get them picked up as part of their regular trash bill, which was $5/mo less than what we in the apartment paid for trash.

For nearly everyone the standard deduction is the way to go lately. If you itemize it's absolutely not the same as businesses being able to deduct their business expenses. There's a good argument businesses should be able to deduct these expenses in my opinion, but for individuals itemizing their deductions it's absolutely not comparable.