What does this mean?

"If you haven't used your passport in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?

"If you haven't used your grandmother's family photo album in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?

"If you haven't used your safety deposit box in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?

If my response sounded like a non-sequiter to you, well, yours sounded like one to me. The article is not about whether retailers pay attention to shopper's habits, nor does it have anything to do with high prices.

Instead, it is entirely about whether advertising campaigns encouraging people to buy and consume less (for environmental reasons, not economic protest) actually change the behavior of the people who hear them. It concludes that they do not. Do you still beg to differ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR_Y_yf84m8

Holy shit, it looks like it was going at full highway speeds (at least) in a residential neighborhood. Doesn't look like it attempts to stop or steer away at any point. This seems like the outcome one would expect from a passed-out driver and a stuck accelerator. I'm honestly amazed that the driver survived.

> It seems like you agree it would be bad for the government to be able to buy your house when you give an accurate assessment.

You're thinking about this wrong (as is the person you were replying to). The whole point of this system is to define "accurate assessment" as the break-even price where you could take or leave being bought out. That's how much the property is actually worth to you. Not some estimate of the aggregate market price. By definition, it's value to you is greater than or equal to the market price because if it's lower, why haven't you sold already? In other words, the idea is not to tax market price, but "market price + consumer surplus".

Note that because everyone's valuation would go up, this should be paired with a reduction in the tax rate.

-It's not clear to me whether the game is intended to accept any valid intermediate move or to only accept moves that lead to the correct solution. For a while, I though it only accepted correct moves, because it would not accept "steak->house" or "stake->holder" as valid moves, when I think those should clearly be valid "compound" actions (if I understand the rules correctly).

-On the other hand, I now realize that it wouldn't make sense to have an "undo" button if it were impossible to input valid but wrong moves. So maybe omitting steakhouse and stakeholder was an oversight? But now I've spend a while in a "dead end" when I thought the game was telling me I was on the right track.

-At this point, I've spend more time trying to figure this meta question about the rules than I have spent trying to solve the actual puzzle. It would help if the instructions or the game feedback made it clear whether "acceptance" = "correctness" or mere "validity".

-Also, I tried to start off with steak->stake as my homophone move, but it only accepts it as an anagram move. Obviously it's both, but there's no way for me to pick which one I want to use (and therefore free up the move I want to reserve for later).

I would not be surprised if the bank had gotten 50 such phone calls over the preceding two months. The fact that one of them happened to actually be Pope Leo is just the punchline. I'm sure there actually is a way to accomplish this without him coming to the US, but it should 't be accessible to a voice on the phone.