Comments on: Open thread 12/3/2025

By: Lee Also

Lee Also — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:39:22 +0000

Aesop Fan — on top of all you just listed, they really aren’t that affordable if you want to be connected to utilities and have a real toilet. The connections and land make them about $300K. If you can build them yourself, you’ll save some money on labor.

By: Mrs Whatsit

Mrs Whatsit — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:03:25 +0000

I know two people living happily in tiny houses. Both are single women, one in her twenties, the other retired. Interestingly, both have access to a “real” house next door where they can socialize and sometimes spread out a little, although they live mainly in their own tiny spaces. The retired woman’s home is on her son’s property; they share meals sometimes and visit back and forth. The young woman shared a house with several friends while she built her tiny house herself. On completion she parked it in the friends’ backyard. She does use some space in the friends’ house for a workspace; she is an illustrator whose supplies really won’t fit in her efficient little home. I think the availability of a larger space for occasional use makes everyday life in the tiny space much more do-able.

Both of their houses are completely charming and full of clever little tucked-in spaces under stairs and such. I don’t think I, personally, could live in them too long without feeling claustrophobic, but the ways I spend my time now require space. It might be different if my life were more contained. I do remember, once in my early 20s, visiting someone who lived in a retro classic trailer on the shore of a lake, with beautiful clever little wooden cabinets and any number of charming hidey-holes to make space, and lovely wide-open views outside the tiny trailer windows. I was entranced.

By: RigelDog

RigelDog — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:00:58 +0000

The standout feature of TDS, IMO, is the viciousness, the hate.
Logic, observation, group psychology, and history tell me that the Left is susceptible to something like evil incarnate, and like anti-semitism, it never really goes away. I have well-founded fears that we are in great peril of having it destroy our society and basically take over the world. Sounds hyperbolic, I know, but the point is that I am 100% convinced of the danger.
And yet, I have nothing like hate in my heart for the vast majority of people who are advocating for these dangerous policies and developments—let alone my beloved family and friends. I am also willing to have any kind of discussion they’re willing to have in candor and good will.
Why oh why do I see the humanity and perspective of these people, but they are infected with some kind of werewolf virus that turns them into beasts focused only on personal destruction??

By: Barry Meislin

Barry Meislin — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:37:23 +0000

Planet Taliban and the Afghan DC shooter.

(The plot ~~thickens~~ changes direction and extreme vigilance is required.)

“Bombshell Report Reveals Shocking New Motive for DC National Guard Shooter”—
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/12/03/bombshell-report-reveals-shocking-new-motive-for-dc-national-guard-shooter-n4946678.

Opening graf:

The shooting of two National Guard members in Washington last week has taken a jarring new turn, and the emerging theory about the gunman’s motive points to a far deeper national security threat…”

Good job, “Biden”!

By: AesopFan

AesopFan — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 03:30:15 +0000

Tiny houses are great if you are retired; single; have no friends or family visiting for more than a few hours; don’t have books, musical instruments, or hobbies with physical objects; never decorate for holidays; don’t cook; and apparently have no car (or all that stuff would be in your garage).

It also helps if you can put them on a lovely lot, preferably not next to a trailer park, which is what these resemble; and can afford a large storage unit for the stuff you can’t keep in the house.

Other than that, the hidden features are quite fun, and I would put one in my backyard as a reading retreat or guest house.

By: Rufus T. Firefly

Rufus T. Firefly — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 03:06:02 +0000

3i atlas,

Thank you for sharing your story. Very interesting. I wish all the best for you and your wife!

By: neo

neo — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:28:18 +0000

I've put up a new post on TDS - please see this.

By: huxley

huxley — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:03:53 +0000

physicsguy raises a valid point, that TDS goes well beyond the usual tribal group dynamics.

I can speculate, but I’m really not sure what supercharges the TDS we see today.

Back in the 80s I was a Bay Area leftist. We hated Reagan, but it wasn’t like TDS today.

By: miguel cervantes,

miguel cervantes, — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:39:29 +0000

for the middle brow set, there was the west wing which was sorkin’s (but as important martin sheen nee estevez),0 fan fiction when the Clinton administration proved too pedestrian for their tastes,
certainly the Obama’s tried to portray this redemptive version of lefty politics,

sheen who I had recalled his far left politics
certainly going back to the 80s re Central America, it’s not lost on me, he was the narrator of Oliver Stone’s desinforma, about the assassinations, which inspired a certain degree of self loathing among Americans, that Max Holland would debunk much of it, didn’t really matter, as dw griffith put it ‘when you write with lightning’ see the Watergate fairy tale, that Bob Woodward used as his calling card, when a GS-18 with a grudge, was purposed as an honest whistleblower, the more complicated details of Mark Felt’s life were left on the cutting room floor, in the Liam Neeson hagiography, Stephen Sodebergh tried some of this moral equivalence in Syriana, which was supposed to be based on Bob Baer’s memoir, well very loosely, but it has had limited purchase,

the brat pack, which included the more nobler sheen, emilio, was full of second generation lefties include rob lowe, who did turn out to be, the black sheep in the end,

By: Kate

Kate — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:32:11 +0000

Eeyore, on a Kindle, probably.