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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s a three story brick Victorian, using the different colors to accent different parts of the exterior. $50 dollars wouldn’t get you up to the trim under the roof.

    You get what you pay for. It was freshly painted when we bought it, and the paint started falling off almost as soon as we moved in.

    Back when we got it painted we got estimates from 13 different companies. Lowest estimate back then was $9000. We asked everyone how long they guaranteed their work for. 12 companies said you can’t guarantee paint jobs because sun and weather can cause them to fail.

    The remaining guy was the most expensive, but he guaranteed his work for 8 years. His paint job lasted more than 15 years before it started to wear out.

    Of course, it’s almost been 30 years now, and it’s in pretty bad shape. I wish I had the money to fix it up, but we also raised three kids and put them through college in between.


  • Back when we were painting our house, I disagreed with my wife about one of the colors.

    It’s a Victorian house. We were doing a Forest Green, and a mint green, and I wanted to include burgundy. However she chose plum.

    As soon as we saw it on the house, she realized the burgundy would have been better.

    We just lived with it.

    We’re about 10 years late for repainting, and the paint has faded so much the greens look blue. I don’t know when we’ll be able to do it again. The painter we used was very, very good, but if I correct for inflation, hiring him again today would cost over $40,000.





  • That’s a far cry from a stipulation that any state unhappy with the union could leave. While the Declaration of Independence is an important founding document of our country, it does not have the force of law.

    I would argue secession as it was imagined by the rebel states was implicitly unconstitutional already. That was certainly the position of the Union during the Civil War. You can’t guarantee individual rights of U.S. citizens in the Constitution and allow states to free themselves from the obligation to respect those rights by just choosing to secede.

    We do have the ability to dissolve the union as envisioned by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, but it can’t be done unilaterally by any one state. We could do it with a constitutional amendment.

    The only other way is through blood and death. As you point out, that hasn’t worked so far.