The consequence is that he is not a total simp for Trump the way most of the rest of the party is. Aid to Ukraine has been a very large division, to name one example.
My point isn't that he's a good guy. I'm saying that he's not Tom Cotton, and if you don't think that's a meaningful difference, you don't pay much attention to the Senate.
Prices of things are becoming absolutely insane. $800+ rent, $30,000 cars, $10 sub sandwiches, etc. It would be nice to do a 3/1 split and cut everything by 2/3. Then we would have $266 rent, $10,000 cars, and $3.33 sub sandwiches. Wages, debts, everything would drop to 1/3 what they are now. It would also make coins useful...
The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies....
The chaos itself is worth a lot, but beyond that, the thing you have to understand in regimes like Russia is the massive incentive to never admit any kind of failure, which results in an increasing build-up of little lies as you move up the chain of command so that the dictator's close circle can tell him that everything is wonderful, when on the ground it's a disaster of people terrified to admit any kind of fault.
It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess....
I think a nontrivial amount of people are essentially incapable of dealing with even a minute amount of social awkwardness or guilt and functionally cannot bring themselves to hit the zero button, so they'd rather complain about having been made to make the choice rather than accept the fact that they have zero willpower.
Maybe this makes me a selfish ass, but honestly, that doesn't bother me very much. If those people want to help subsidize my own purchases, I'm not gonna complain about it.
Generally, buying a house is a good long-term strategy.
The essence of it is that this is only true if housing prices continue to go up, which is fundamentally at odds with the societal goal of housing being affordable. Houses cannot be both cheap and good investments. Over the past ~100 years, housing has been treated largely as an investment vehicle, which has created the current mess where you're golden if you're rich enough to buy and thoroughly fucked if you can't.
We've been grossly underbuilding for decades relative to population growth in cities, and this is the result. We'd be much better off if we built enough to make housing a non-issue and left the investments to assets that aren't required to live. But also, depending on the market, rents can be cheaper relative to a mortgage such that investing the difference in stocks etc. will have you pull out ahead. That's beyond the fact that, in some markets, down payments are simply out of reach of most people. I'm in Manhattan, and a decent condo clocks in at around a million. I might get there if I get married and we save for a solid chunk of time, but this isn't a place where a young person can move and quickly decide to buy a place. Renting isn't a bad thing in situations like this.
The rise in vacancies across Seattle is directly linked to the rate of newly constructed apartments, according to Capital Economics, and it’s increased from 5.2% at the end of 2019 to 7% by midyear 2023. Already, Seattle’s asking rent growth rate is at -2% and could fall further.
I'd really encourage people to actually read the article too. This is a direct consequence of increased construction, and just another piece of evidence to add to the rapidly growing pile showing that adding new housing stock - of any and all kinds - does cause a reduce pressures on rent.
Mastodon is interoperable, decentralized, operated by a nonprofit, lively, and, ACTUALLY, isn't hard to use. So why is everyone championing Threads as the main Twitter alternative?
Mate I think people are just kinda lazy and don't really care that much about privacy relative to ease of use and the presence of people they're interested in.
The U.S. Libertarian Party has filed for conservatorships for President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to them as “geriatric elites” mentally unfit to properly serve the American populace....
Kbin collects all of that same info from Lemmy and vice versa (except for IP, which I don't think would ever be shared to begin with?).
The literal entire point of the fediverse is to share content in a public and interoperable way, so why are you surprised that a fediverse client would be collecting profile pictures and posts, when that's exactly what you'd need to do in order to display them?
Like, if you simply have no trust in Meta at all and refuse to interact with them, that's fine, but just say that and don't pretend it's because of the horror of displaying usernames.
The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.
Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is expected to open a congressional investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as soon as Thursday, a source tells CNN – the same day former President Donald Trump is slated to surrender at the county jail after being charged for participating in schemes to...
And who's paying the construction company or contractor?
Like, if you want to advocate for the abolition of private property ownership, that's fine, and it's a model that has actually worked halfway decently in some countries (though the lifetime leases aren't necessarily that functionally different than ownership). But just own up to what you're actually proposing and state that you think the government should own all property.
Food is also an essential need, but it absolutely has a massive profit-driven market around it that generally works. I'd argue that there are specific flaws in the housing market that can and should be addressed, not that the very concept of having a housing market is inherently flawed.
The amount of vacant units in cities where people actually want to live tends to be highly exaggerated (Manhattan is generally sitting somewhere around a 5% vacancy rate), but twisting income tax into some weird kind of tax on unrealized value is administratively messy and completely unnecessary when we already have much simpler solutions in the forms of land value taxes or even basic property taxes. Not to mention, increasing taxes on rental units just increases everyone's rent, which is a rather odd strategy if the aim is to make housing more affordable.
People really will propose literally anything except the wild concept of building more housing.
This is a very sudden jump from "housing shouldn't be so expensive", which essentially everyone agrees with, to "we should abolish private property", which you'll find is a significantly less popular proposal.
so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there
Come now, that's far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn't that the real objective here?
Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that's even assuming you can find land that isn't exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn't single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you're claiming to care about the poor.
Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.
You're actually on to something here. There is far far far more food produced than we could ever consume; so much that a massive amount is literally thrown away. Whereas with housing, we've been grossly underbuilding for decades now. If, in a year, you have 25,000 people who want to move to your city, but you've only added 2000 units of housing, then the inevitable result is that the richest 2000 people get the housing, and the owners of that housing can charge extremely high prices. Given this, why the hell is it literally illegal in most of the land in our cities to build anything other than a detached single family home that might house four or five people, as opposed to a duplex or small apartment building that could house two or three times as many?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't tweak around with the allocation incentives, but there's simply no where to policy your way around the fact that our urban areas have far too little housing for the amount of people who want to live there.
I actually agree with a lot of those proposals, but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford. You could vaporize every landlord in New York City today, and the housing would still be incredibly valuable and far more expensive than most people could afford. I live here myself, and while I do hope to own some day, that's simply not financially feasible for me right now. People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody. I only moved here a year ago, and I'm quite happy to have not had to combine all the hassle of moving with the added pressure of purchasing an asset that will tie up my net worth for a good few decades.
I can see some merit to systems like China or Singapore where land is leased directly from the government rather than private landlords (and arguably, given the existence of land and property taxes, it's a nominal distinction really), but still, you've got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.
Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices
The fundamental misunderstanding in this view, IMO, is that greed is not something that landowners are uniquely equipped with. Rice is cheap as hell; are rice producers simply not greedy, and that's why rice is cheap? No, it's because an absolutely massive amount of rice is produced every day, and there's more than enough around to ensure anyone who wants rice can get it. Slightly more abstractly, there is more than enough supply to meet the demand. And like housing, cheap food is an absolute need. But unlike food, housing has been woefully underproduced for decades now in cities, and government policy has done a lot to cause that. It's illegal to build denser than single-family homes in most urban land, and the aim of policy has been more to protect people's investments rather than have housing be affordable - two goals that are fundamentally at odds with each other.
This isn't a coincidence, of course. A lot of federal housing policy goes back to the 50s and 60s, when you had suburbs that literally banned people of color from living in them. Housing policy was explicitly designed to advantage landowners and penalize renters, which is to say, wealthier white families pursuing The American Dream™ and urban Black families whose neighborhoods were systematically redlined and demolished to build highways for white suburbanites.
Those empty houses are largely in places where people do not want to live. If you look at markets where people actually live, it's a pretty different picture. A shack in the middle of the field in Nebraska does not help a homeless man in Manhattan (and he almost certainly wouldn't take it if you offered it for free).
Losses during the vacancy period would just be accounted for by bumping up the rent on tenants a bit. If you expect an average vacancy to cost you $1200, you'll just increase rent by $100 a month.
Sure, you could accept the loss, but if you're okay with that lower profit margin, you'd have already decreased the rent by that same $100.
Totally agree with you; this frustration is a direct and obvious result of decades of policy failures. I just worry that a lot of the ensuing anger is a bit misplaced.
I do think that there's been a sharp acceleration in recent years towards actual concrete steps, even though they're not super flashy and will take more time to see results. There's been real progress towards zoning reform, abolishing parking minimums, and other bits of red tape that have played a huge role in housing costs exploding.
That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.
Agreed, but there's a lot that could be done to make it much much easier. For nearly a century, housing policy has been explicitly designed to make housing a productive asset for investment, which is a goal that's fundamentally opposed to housing being affordable.
A policy like this would apply to the entire market. All landlords have vacancies at least occasionally, due to renovations or bad luck.
It won't affect a tenant's ability to pay more, but a policy that increases ownership costs across the board means that there won't be cheaper alternatives in the competition, so the tenant will need to either find a way to pay the increase or they'll have to leave to a cheaper market. The highest rent the market can bear will go up if it's not possible to compete any further on lower prices.
I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it's illegal, because reasons.
The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.
You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue, the rest of all that is really just details haha. I'm not hugely confident of public housing's track record in the US (though there's obviously a lot that went into that), but whether it's new public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don't really care so long as there are units.
All landlords have occasional vacancies, so a vacancy tax would increase the costs that all landlords bear, at least slightly. Landlords will name the highest price that won't cause renters to simply choose an alternative. If there is no cheaper alternative because the entire market is being affected, they simply have to find a way to deal with it.
I'm not hugely against vacancy taxes really, but they need to be well-targeted to not affect the occasional bit of bad luck or renovation. Otherwise, the only way it actually helps the market is if it causes enough previously withheld supply to enter the market, and most expensive cities don't actually have all that many vacancies. NYC is at something like 5%, which included units between tenants and those under renovation. Sure, there's the occasional billionaire with an empty penthouse, but compared to the millions of renters looking for normal housing, there really aren't that many rich oligarchs hoarding housing for fun and games.
Especially in large cities like New York, where there's an endless amount of very good food, most apartment kitchens are very small, and many people make a pretty decent amount of money. plenty of people cook very little or not at all.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick Democrat who has often bucked party leadership, told a radio station in his home state of West Virginia on Thursday that he is “thinking seriously” about leaving the party....
Oh no, the Dems have now lost the Senate and will be unable to appoint any judges, the importance of which I think has become abundantly clear over the past several years, but at least, for a brief moment, we got a little ideological satisfaction.
If Manchin didn't exist, not a single piece of Biden's agenda over the past two years would have passed, including things like Justice Jackson joining the Supreme Court.
Yes, he's incredibly annoying, but he's also representing the people of West Virginia, of all places. Would you really prefer a 6-2 Supreme Court? I wouldn't.
Justice Jackson is on the Supreme Court, and would not be if Manchin (or Sinema, for that matter) hadn't approved.
So yes, they have helped the Dems. Not to mention, every significant piece of legislation that passed in the last Congress could have been killed by either of them.
The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults is preventing thousands of premature deaths each year, a landmark study finds.[1] It saved the lives of at least 19,200 adults aged 55 to 64 over the four-year period from 2014 to 2017. Conversely, 15,600 older adults died prematurely because of state decisions not to expand Medicaid. (See Figure 1; see Table 1 for state-by-state estimates.) The lifesaving impacts of Medicaid expansion are large: an estimated 39 to 64 percent reduction in annual mortality rates for older adults gaining coverage.
I imagine the several thousand people who are not dead might disagree with the assessment that the ACA (which wasn't a particularly bipartisan endeavor, if you care to check the vote count) did nothing but increase insurance costs.
I don't care enough to respond to the rest of that drivel, and I know you have no interest in facts anyway, but for any readers passing by, there are actual facts that you should look up.
Right to work refers specifically to laws that make mandatory union membership illegal. It has absolutely nothing to do with at-will employment, termination, or anything relevant here.
Again, that is not what 'right to work' means. You are talking about 'at-will' employment, which is a completely different topic that is essentially unrelated.
It doesn't; this guy is just unaware of what 'right to work' means (admittedly, it's a deliberately obtuse name), and seems to have no willingness to entertain the possibility that he might not know something.
Do you have any evidence that the placement in algorithmic timeline was monetized? They have said that they expect to eventually roll out advertising, but for now at least, there aren't any (explicitly inserted) ads.
I've noticed that the Following tab for me is kinda empty since a lot of people I'm following aren't posting much yet. I think the algorithmic view was mostly there to prevent the app from feeling like a ghost town as it was getting started.
I think they were rushing it to try to take advantage of Twitter's X-plosion. From my understanding, it was a bit of a mad dash behind the scenes to get to the initial release.
Republican presidential candidate and North Dakota Gov Doug Burgum is offering $20 gift cards to donors who give $1 to his campaign — but some supporters of Joe Biden say they have been funneling the gift card money to the president’s re-election campaign.
That is entirely the point. They'd rather maintain their own sense of ideological purity and don't care who gets harmed in the process.
Being able to focus on rigid ideological purity is an incredibly privileged position that you can only take if t you know the consequences won't actually hurt you.
Medicare For All comes immediately to mind as a broadly popular policy.
For starters, because this isn't actually true.
The latest findings, from Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare poll conducted Nov. 9-Dec. 2, 2022, show 57% think the government should be responsible to ensure coverage for all Americans, while 40% say it should not.
Currently, 53% of U.S. adults prefer a private system, while 43% support a government-run system.
Leftists often drastically overestimate how popular significant healthcare reforms actually are. The government merely offering a public option is more popular, and if I recall, was something Biden actually supported, though it wasn't ever going to the last Congress, let alone this one. Full-scale socialization of the medical system à la the British NHS is far less popular.
Edit: downvoting me for reporting
data does not change the truth, but if anyone has an actual point to make I'd be more than happy to hear it.
McConnell will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November after a record run in the job ( apnews.com )
Mitch McConnell says he'll step down as Senate Republican leader in November.
should the US consider a currency redenomination?
Prices of things are becoming absolutely insane. $800+ rent, $30,000 cars, $10 sub sandwiches, etc. It would be nice to do a 3/1 split and cut everything by 2/3. Then we would have $266 rent, $10,000 cars, and $3.33 sub sandwiches. Wages, debts, everything would drop to 1/3 what they are now. It would also make coins useful...
How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse ( plasticbag.org )
Young voters explain why they’re bailing on Biden, and whether they’d come back ( www.nbcnews.com )
Ukrainian military says it hacked Russia's federal tax agency ( www.bleepingcomputer.com )
The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies....
Americans are confused, frustrated by new tipping culture, study finds ( www.washingtonpost.com )
It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess....
Housing market affordability is so bad that Zillow says it will take you 13.5 years to break even on a purchase from July onward ( finance.yahoo.com )
Seattle apartment values could crater by 30%, Capital Economics says ( fortune.com )
Mastodon Is the Good One ( www.404media.co )
Mastodon is interoperable, decentralized, operated by a nonprofit, lively, and, ACTUALLY, isn't hard to use. So why is everyone championing Threads as the main Twitter alternative?
Libertarians want control over Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell ( www.newsweek.com )
The U.S. Libertarian Party has filed for conservatorships for President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to them as “geriatric elites” mentally unfit to properly serve the American populace....
Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse ( wedistribute.org )
Threads, Meta's new microblogging platform, is updating its terms to focus on data collection from "Third Party Users".
[News] House Judiciary Committee expected to launch inquiry into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ( www.cnn.com )
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is expected to open a congressional investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as soon as Thursday, a source tells CNN – the same day former President Donald Trump is slated to surrender at the county jail after being charged for participating in schemes to...
Landlords should have to pay income tax on their rental properties regardless of whether they're rented out or not. ( gothamist.com )
cross-posted from: lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162...
What are your best tips to save money?
Following the credit card thread, I’ve learned that some people use credit card points and miles to pay for hotels, that seems pretty interesting....
US Senator Joe Manchin says 'thinking seriously' about leaving Democratic Party ( www.reuters.com )
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick Democrat who has often bucked party leadership, told a radio station in his home state of West Virginia on Thursday that he is “thinking seriously” about leaving the party....
Seattle becomes first in U.S. to protect gig workers from sudden 'deactivation' ( kuow.org )
Birthright citizenship is fundamental to “who we are as a nation.” So why do Republicans attack it? ( www.motherjones.com )
Threads is rolling out its Following feed ( www.theverge.com )
Now you can scroll through posts from only people you follow.
News: Biden supporters exploit Republican’s $1 donation cashback campaign pledge: ‘I gave $1 to you and $20 to Biden’ ( www.independent.co.uk )
Republican presidential candidate and North Dakota Gov Doug Burgum is offering $20 gift cards to donors who give $1 to his campaign — but some supporters of Joe Biden say they have been funneling the gift card money to the president’s re-election campaign.
[Analysis] 'People are hungry for more choices': Inside the Green Party's push for 2024 ( abcnews.go.com )
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