Owning a home in the United States is becoming a pipe dream for more and more citizens. In some parts of the country, unless you’re completely debt-free and not only earning enough cash to afford a fat mortgage payment, along with having a high enough credit score to get approved financing in the first place, you also are expected to front the bill for constantly increasing property taxes.

This means that you have to pay even more money just for the privilege of owning a piece of property that you’re already paying for in the first place.

Even if you’re lucky enough to pay off your property, you’ll still need to fork over annual taxes just to make sure that it isn’t seized by the government and pawned off at a tax sale.

So not only is home-owning becoming prohibitively expensive, but those who are manufacturing/remodeling these homes are receiving an influx of complaints as to their quality. Meaning that the most costly purchase in someone’s life oftentimes ends up becoming something that they don’t even want in the first place.

Well, TikToker Robert Langford and his fiance Andrea Jones opted for a solution that many other folks are finding more and more attractive these days: tiny homes.

They highlighted a massive backyard shed that was being offered by the Home Depot, complete with installation and full building materials, that could be financed for around $252 a month. A Duet of the clip with fellow user Marcel Monroe reacting to the house and all of its amenities, conceding for that amount of money, it’s a pretty darn good deal.

“Ya’ll, there’s a post going around saying apparently you can get a house from Home Depot now. You can’t beat these prices at all. Inflation is on the rise. We about to go on a recession,” Marcel said.

There are tons of materials and resources that have highlighted the pros and cons of Tiny Home life, however, it’s hard to deny that it’s definitely a more cost-effective solution than renting.

Some Tiny Homes are even built on towable hitches, meaning that folks can hook them up to a reliable car and drive around the country. With a boom of remote work opportunities available, many Americans could live like nomads and even shack up their towable trailers at campgrounds/RV parks for utility hookups.

Or they could build a stationary “shed house” like Langford, complete with the scaled-down amenities/necessities other, full-sized homes require. Robert said that the backyard shed took about five years to complete and cost him $50,000 to turn into its full homely glory.

Tons of commenters thought that it was “sad” many millennial and Gen-Z people are having to seriously consider living in structures intended as sheds in the United States.

The Home Depot offers an array of different backyard shed and Tiny Home kits. If you’re thinking about purchasing one, make sure to read the item description to itemize what exactly is being offered in the product package.

Some of the kits just sell aluminum framing for the tiny home, so make sure that the Home Depot you’re buying from will also be willing to set up the basic structure for you. Of course, you’ll need to mention that you’ll want to have a fully functioning plumbing/electrical system and be forthright with your local retailer, to see how much of that work they can assist you with. Of course, if you’re handy yourself, then you could probably handle the logistics of that yourself.

If you want to know what it’s like to actually live in a tiny home, you can check out Robert’s TikTok account where he posts a series of videos asking followers’ questions. He built the Tiny House as a backyard studio, but many think it looks like a more-than-viable living space for their needs.

If you’re a bit cautious about building a permanent structure, buying a piece of property and living in a trailer is also an affordable/practical solution.

With rental properties costing more and more every single year, saving up money to afford a home is becoming a more and more difficult prospect for many people. And it’s not like that money you’re renting with is building up any equity. So, investing that same amount of money you’d otherwise be putting into rent for a plot of land that you develop while living on said land in a tiny home, allows you to save up and build your “forever home” while you’re there.

And if you decide while living in said tiny home that the scaled-down life is for you, then you can just spend your money on other things and continue living in your tiny house.

The Gist:

• Donald Trump has railed against windmills regularly on the campaign trail for years.
• His hatred of windmills seems to come from the birds they kill and because they are ugly.
• They’re also a useful proxy for Trump as he rails against efforts designed to combat climate change, whether they involve windmills or not.

Few politicians in American history are more improvisational and freewheeling than Donald Trump, which has naturally meant that his rallies contain a wide array of different topics and ideas. Sometimes, if you’re just watching those rallies, it can be hard to follow his train of thought or keep up with the various conspiracies and ideas that pepper his speeches.

For almost as long as Trump has been holding rallies, though, he has had a pretty popular target that wasn’t a Democratic politician. Instead, Trump has spent a seemingly inordinate amount of time railing against windmills, which has naturally led many to wonder where this hatred of windmills comes from.

As this compilation shows, Trump has been going after windmills for years, and often does so at least in part by calling them “bird killers.” While it’s true that windmills do kill at least 100,000 birds every year, they are far from the only man-made structures responsible for bird deaths. Power lines, for example, are responsible for a far larger number of bird deaths, and it’s not like Trump is known for being an avid conservationist.

So, while windmills do kill lots of birds, that may not totally explain why Trump hates them. Clips of him talking about them also seem to suggest that he thinks they’re a blight on the landscapes they inhabit. This is a pretty common knock on windmills, but not one that should overwhelm their potential benefits in moving us toward a cleaner grid that’s less reliant on fossil fuels.

As is so often the case with Trump, it seems like he has chosen windmills as a proxy for the broader issue of environmentalism. Windmills are something that many people don’t like, so when talking about the transition to a green economy, he discusses windmills like they’re a menace in order to convince people that transitioning to a greener economy is a bad idea.

The Gist:

• Facebook updated its logo on Sept. 20, 2023, with a deeper blue and some small changes to the “f” in the logo.
• The changes were designed to make the logo more “electrifying” and “everlasting,” but they definitely aren’t major shifts.
• The company also made slight updates to its wordmark to align it with the new logo.

Although it may not be as popular with younger generations as it once was, Facebook remains the most widely used social media service on the planet. As such, Facebook has remained remarkably consistent over the years, doing very little rock the boat or change up its platform so that users feel uncomfortable or confused.

On Sept. 20, 2023, Facebook made a change that many people may have overlooked. Now, as they open the app or look at it on their browser, though, they have realized that something seems different. The blue in the logo seems different, and many people want to know why.

Facebook did make a slight update to its logo, and the blue in the logo is now a bit darker. Additionally, they made a few minor changes to the “f” that are almost imperceptible unless you know where they are.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, explained the change by saying that they wanted to make a new logo that seemed “everlasting.”

“Our intention was to create a refreshed design of the Facebook logo that was bolder, electric, and everlasting,” the company said in a blog post. “Each of the distinctive, new refinements drive greater harmony across the entire design as a key element of the app’s identity. We’ve done this by incorporating a more confident expression of Facebook’s core blue color that is built to be more visually accessible in our app and provides stronger contrast for the ‘f’ to stand apart.”

The logo is certainly different, but it isn’t a radical change, which makes sense. According to Meta’s own statistics, Facebook is visited by a staggering 2 billion people every day, so a radical overhaul of the logo would likely cause a pretty significant disruption. They’ve updated the logo, but hopefully they haven’t made it any harder for all of their regular users to find the app on their phones.