The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.
There’s a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it’s less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.
Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.
But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.
A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.
This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.
It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.
Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.
The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.
Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.
Ivermectin is a general antiparasitic drug used in dogs, horses, sheep, cows, reptiles, and humans. It’s on the WHO’s list of essential medicines, and it was the 341th most commonly prescribed medication in the US. We use it for lice, scabies, whipworm, etc.
These people use horse paste because it’s available off the shelf at Tractor Supply, whereas to get ivermectin for humans requires a prescription from a doctor. Which they’re not gonna get, because it doesn’t work for covid.
And they shouldn’t get it, because we don’t want to overuse it and end up with ivermectin resistant parasites. Hell, I wouldn’t be opposed to ivermectin for horses requiring a vet prescription and doing fecal egg counts so we don’t end up with resistant strongloides.
There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:
There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.
I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.
Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.