Sunday's Most Active Threads

Yesterday's most active thread was titled, "De facto 'as is'" and posted in the "Real Estate" forum. The original poster has previously purchased four houses, but is in the process of buying a home in northern Virginia for the first time. A home inspector found several items, some of which are fairly big ticket, that needed repair or replacement. Based on the original poster's experience, he expected that he could submit the inspector's report to the sellers and they would then negotiate an amount that the sellers would cover. However, the sellers refused to provide any money in response to the inspector's report. Therefore, the original poster considers this to be an "as is" sale even though it was not advertised that way and asks if this is normal in northern Virginia. Without explicitly saying so, many of those responding make it clear that this is fairly normal behavior for sellers in northern Virginia. Many of those responders criticized the original poster because they believe he should have noticed many of the items the inspector identified before making an offer and other items would not normally be considered in such negotiations. Other posters are more sympathetic to the original poster and agree that there should be some negotiation. Posters on both sides of this argument agree that the original poster should simply walk away from this purchase if he is unhappy about the seller's refusal to negotiate. Much of the thread is devoted to analyzing the list of items identified by the inspector. Many argue that only items that present safety hazards should be covered. The original poster at first estimated that the cost to repair things would be $15,000, but after several posters suggest cheaper alternative ways of addressing the issues, he seems to conclude he could get by at a fraction of this price. As a result, the original poster seems to be reconsidering whether this is even that big of a deal and is going to take the days he has remaining before being required to respond to consider his options. The original poster is fully prepared to walk away from the deal and mentions from that from now on he will negotiate offers with the expectations that sellers will not be willing to negotiate inspection findings.

The second most active thread yesterday was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. Titled, "The future of Russia. Any foreign policy experts want to weigh in?", the original poster is seeking opinions about what things might look like with regard to Russia in 10 years. The original poster listed, seven different scenarios, but missed what I think may be the most likely outcome. It takes until the third page before posters begin to touch that, but even then the posters are not very explicit. A weakened Russia will likely be exploited by China with Siberia and parts of Russian Central Asia falling under de facto if not de jure Chinese control. This thread was sidetracked in a multitude of ways with posters fixating on Chechnya, Africa, and even Israel. Several posters were devoted to arguing about a phrase posted in Cyrillic that one poster believes to be Mongolian and another Chechen. Posters argue about information control in both the US and Russia with a poster seeming to argue that "cancel culture" in the US is equal to the official media control in Russia. The thread gets so bogged down in disputes about Chechnya that it is almost impossible to follow. Self-proclaimed experts dispute the qualifications and knowledge of other self-proclaimed experts. In the midst of all of this, one or more posters insist on repeatedly arguing that the US is just as bad — or at least bad enough — as Russia and not in a position to criticize. By the end, this thread has lost all sense of coherency and I have really no idea what anyone is trying to say. Page 21 of the thread is basically an argument about the US and Israel and using their actions to excuse what Russia is doing. I have no idea what the relevance of that is to the state of of Russia in 10 years, but while a lot can be said about this thread, one thing that cannot be said is that there was any attempt to keep it on topic.

The third thread at which I'll look was titled, "Teachers, would writing a letter to Dr. Reed do anything?" and posted in the "Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)". I am not fully up to speed on all of this, but apparently changes in Fairfax County Public Schools policies have significantly upped the workload on special education teachers. In addition, it seems that teachers — and maybe others — were supposed to have updated their W-2 forms this year. Those who failed to do so are finding that they need to pay taxes this year rather than receive a refund. The original poster is a FCPS special education teacher who has found herself with an increased work burden and fallen on the wrong side of the tax situation. These two things together have soured her attitude toward FCPS and she is finding opportunities in Prince Williams schools to look pretty appealing. This thread appears to be chock full of substantive and useful information, but it is far too dense for me to easily comprehend in the limited time I have to try to understand the thread for purposes of this post. Two things that I did understand, however, is that the original poster misspelled the surname of the FCPS superintendent — it is "Reid" — and that on the day that the last student who was impacted by Covid-related school closures ages out of k-12, I will do a happy dance in hope that DCUM may no longer be plagued by bitter parents disrupting every thread to blame teachers.

The final thread at which I'll look today was posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. Titled, "BBC article on celebrity surrogacy", the original poster links to a BBC article which I haven't read but which I understand provides details of the experience of one or more women who acted as birth surrogats for celebrities. The original poster says that the article does not name the celebrities and she encourages posters to guess who they might be. Basically, all the DCUM bête noire celebrities are suggested with Hilaria Baldwin and Priyanka Chopra being two popular mentions. I am only surprised that nobody managed to make a convincing argument for Meghan Markle given suspicions among some DCUMers that she was faking her pregnancies. Most of the celebrities mentioned were shot down by posters who considered them to be unlikely candidates. There was a bit of a diversion when posters argued about whether surrogacy should even be allowed. Frankly, I can hardly imagine a topic less deserving of discussion and I am not sure whether to be chagrined that that this thread garnered enough attention to be among the most active or happy that it only managed 6 pages. One would think that any thread involving both Hilaria and Priyanka would get that much within the first hour.