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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
