Turn the question back, actually. Do the DDOSers even think they’re achieving anything relevant, beyond being a bit annoying? .world is down from time to time, wow, how terrible. It’s not like I can’t log onto any other server and interact with world’s channels and threads from there, only to have my posts and upvotes become globally available as soon as world is back- Oh, wait, that’s exactly how it works.
No, you make an alt-account on a non-world instance and interact with world communities from there. The only issue is that you aren’t carrying over your subscriptions and blocks unless you use a special tool, about which I don’t know much.
I tried figuring out how to use the Lemmy API to subscribe to all my subscriptions from my kbin account a week or two ago
I remember getting stuck and giving up, so I think I’m going to do it semi-manually or something later on, unless some kind wizard blesses me with the name of such a tool
No. It’s basically like signing in at another e-mail provider. Instead of [email protected] you now have [email protected] and can from then on e-mail the same contacts. Just with posts, threads and comments instead of e-mail of course.
Each instance keeps a local copy of the communities they’re federated with. Users of that instance interact with the local copy, and instances communicate with each other to tell what’s going on.
This means that, if .world crashes at 5PM, and you have an account on lemm.ee, you can go to lemm.ee’s local copy of world->worldnews, find a thread started at 4PM, comment on it, and other lemm.ee users will see and upvote/downvote your comment.
When .world is back on at 7PM, lemm.ee will tell it: “Hey, Cold_Brew_Enema said [Thanks a lot for the gold kind stranger] and got 6 downvotes”, and .world will update the thread with your comment and downvotes for users of all instances to see.
This is my understanding of how it works, and I’m not familiar with the actual code, but it seems to be close to reality.
There may be some things that don’t get synced if the instance holding the pending federation messages also goes down or restarts because AFAIK they are stored in memory, not in persistent storage.
From the recent update shared, it seems like the ddos is coming from inside the hoose (ie the ddos attacker might be another lemmy instance). In other words the point of the ddos appear to be to cause people to move off of lemmy.world. so in a way it is working. A lot of people are telling people to move off lemmy.world.
The ironic part is that unless they have access to a botnet or are operating their own colo facility, they are probably paying more to run the attack than the target is.
I added that line because they got downvoted, assumed it was because someone thought it was just a statement rather than starting that train of thought
Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.
A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.
But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.
Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.
No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:
Flippers
Landlords-as-a-business.
1) Flippers
The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:
Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.
Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.
And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.
So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.
A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.
Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.
But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.
This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.
2) Landlords-as-a-business
The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:
It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.
As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.
Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.
By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.
Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:
Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.
By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.
Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.
I can’t find the video, but the YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity! Did a pretty well explanation to why housing is so costly on Canada and the main problem is actually zoning laws. Like in 99% in Canada you can’t built anything but single family detached houses.
Creating massive penalties equal to the whole cost of a house for anyone that sells after less than 6-8 years would have devastating unintended consequences. It might make flipping impractical, but it would also hurt a lot of people who find themselves in a position where they need to sell, and would increase the risks associated with buying a house for lower income buyers.
It would help if you targeted the profit from the sale instead of the whole price. Flipping is about buying low, minimizing the cost of improvements, and then selling for a massively inflated amount. Without that profit it’s not worth it. For a normal person, being able to make money on the deal is nice, but at least recouping your costs can keep you economically stable and allow you to move on with your life.
I also think that you would want to combine this with some plan for helping low income buyers with the restoration of neglected properties that would normally be snatched up by flippers.
I also think the arbitrary age restriction on owning a rental property needs an exemption for inherited properties if nothing else. A 20ish year old who inherits a home or rental property when their parent(s) die is not abusing a loophole, and immediately hitting them with additional legal problems and forcing them to sell a house that has a tenant already in there is just unnecessary chaos for everyone involved.
I’m also curious how large apartment complexes fit into this plan. Are they also banned? Do you just need an owner to occupy a (potentially much nicer) apartment in the building? If you can still operate a huge apartment complex, I would expect the market to shift heavily towards those. If you can’t well, that raises it’s own issues around urban housing and population density.
In Switzerland we have a tax when selling a house on the value it gained since you bought it. So if you buy a house for price X and you sell it for more than that, you will be taxed on the price difference. Even if the price difference is just because of market fluctuations.
This is probably a better solution against flippers, since only those making money by increasing house values are taxed. The tax can then be made more or less aggressive as needed.
Love this write up! Thank you for posting, I really like your ideas. Out of curiosity how would apartment buildings work in your plan. There are many cities where you probably don’t want to encourage single family homes to reduce urban sprawl. How would you encourage high density housing in your plan?
Apartments can either be owned by families that upgraded to a house, and are now renting it out, or it can go full social housing where it follows the same model as Vienna, for example.
You need administration to manage an apartment or any physically combined housing, but nothing says that the building itself or the underlying land needs to be owned by a corporation. In fact, true social housing is “owned” by the people, the rent you pay is just for upkeep and to pay off a very long term cost-of-construction bill. Some families in Vienna’s social housing pay less than 20% of their income on rent. You get in young enough, and you’re paying a pittance by the time you retire.
Strong public housing would put most of the ratfuck kinds of landlords out of business by itself, if an affordable non-profit apartment is basically available to anyone who wants one, the private companies jacking up prices for pure profit now have to compete with that, and we solve the inelastic demand issue
I’m okay with house flippers because they’ll buy undervalued run down houses nobody wants and turn them into desirable homes.
House flippers are arguably responsible for a housing-quality crisis. Flippers often fewer lower code requirements than new builders. You end up with a lot of houses with nothing but cosmetic remediation and fairly substantial issues otherwise.
I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but I think those are still the shitty flippers, but maybe the flippers I’m imagining don’t exist in appreciable number.
The problem is the lack of business-reason to spend money on things that do not raise the property value. Unfortunately “fixing things” usually carries a negative value return.
The common things flippers do (and I know this from some friends who did real-estate for flippers) is buy houses that mostly need the most efficient changes - new tile, paint, etc, with minimal inexpensive fixes to make the house saleable. And honestly, that’s obvious when you say it. The extension of that is that if you can cover up an issue or the issue is not outside margins of being saleable (old septic, safe-but-near-EOL electrical, less ideal insulation, intentionally avoiding discovering asbestos where it probably exists, etc), you should.
Then, depending on local laws, flippers have more limited disclosure requirements than builders. Which means anything that isn’t “gross negligence” that cannot show up on a home inspection… you. just. don’t. do.
This would get messy with inheritances. So if you own and a family member passes away, you’d have to either move into that home for two years or it would be worthless to sell? That’s going to create some perverse incentives regarding old folks and housing.
Related to why someone under 25 might own a rental unit.
Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
So make this an exception, on the condition that the child can be classified as an adult by the courts.
And if it’s someone under 25, there is a high likelihood that they’re still living at home and have already occupied the home for some time already. The passing of the parents would have triggered an insurance payout on the home (which is standard in Canada) so there wouldn’t be any kind of mortgage to continue paying, only property taxes. Remaining in the house would be achievable even with a minimum-wage job.
Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
My proposal targets only residential properties. Why would it have any effect on non-residential rentals? The entire purpose of that proposal is to deal with parasitism in the rental market, not anything else.
I did not read all of this yet. But I always agreed with you on that housing as an investment was the crux of the problem, I just never knew exactly how to tackle it. Your write-up is great, and even if there are many issues that could arise from some of the implementation ideas, it’s an amazing beginning to a conversation we should have been having for at least decades.
Thank you very much! I will save this comment to come back to often.
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that’s not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don’t reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.
In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.
Housing units, July 1, 2022, (V2022) USA 143,786,655 Owner-occupied housing unit rate, 2018-2022 64.8% If only 2% is foreign owned that is 2,875,733. Which is a hell of a lot of units
That’s a big problem in makeup too! Companies want to put out “clean” and “natural” makeup but makeup isn’t typically used very quickly. Makeup with no preservatives going bad is common.
Yes, ich_iel mostly just takes English words and translates them 1:1. Doesn’t actually make sense in German, but that’s part of the joke. If you translate it back to English 1:1 again you should understand it perfectly.
As a native German speaker I often had to translate ich_iel memes 1:1 to English first to understand them myself. Its basically English but in German.
They’re not identical, but they have similarities. What Russia is trying to do to Ukraine is not dissimilar to what Israel did to Palestine half a century ago.
I was hoping so hard for a Swanson meme. I thank you from the bottom of my weird little heart. “Why get a ham radio license?” Argh. Because I want to achieve my own Pyramid of Greatness.
I don’t understand how after all these years Steam doesn’t have more granular control over what games / activity you show to the world. Why can I just hide some games?
I prefer it this way. Having to hide all games provides a chance for introspection about the finite amount of time we get in our lives and wether or not tentacle Anime kitten girls are the company in which we want to spend it
Steam recently updated to make it way easier to switch between accounts. It used to be you had to authenticate every time, which was a pain with Steam Guard. Now there’s a Change Account function which won’t invalidate your authentication token though it does seem to sign you out until you switch back.
I use that to ensure I’m not advertising certain games to the world.
I mean, that’s a good one. But the problem for me is that I already have a few special games, and even without playing them they would show up on my profile if I ever set it to visible.
Hey you guys I just had an amazing thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if he just sort of accidentally dropped dead of natural causes or whatever so we could be relieved of all this nonsense? And Biden too…
seriously, imagine what a huge relief that would be.
of course politics would just replace them with some other yahoos up there but can we just move on already…
I disagree actually. It affects your life but you can’t do anything about it. What the politicians say is just hot air anyway. It’s pointless to get emotionally involved and manipulated by their statements. Even bad for you.
I absolutely do NOT follow politics, but am addicted to reddit & Lemmy in my downtime when I’m not doing yoga or massaging people or sleeping and it’s pretty impossible to avoid getting hit in the head with posts mentioning political figures every time we leisurely browse Lemmy.
it’s exactly as you say, but i think moving on and on with worse and worse options is not gonna be better than the current iteration. and no one’s gonna fix the social divide or the voting system. i recommend just stopping to vote and stopping to watch news. the losers have already won, why are we still playing
Local elections are still significant and will have impact on your area. These are the people allocate funds in your city - could be the difference in roads getting fixed or yet another pet project no one asked for.
What really sucks is my local politicians are very outwardly partisan, even though the positions are supposed to be nonpartisan. The surprising thing is that there are more liberalish residents than I expected. Unfortunately it’s just not enough to change what we get.
You know I do kinda wonder what effect that would have culturally, especially if that became a kind of trend or mainstay. Like, obviously a big investigation would take place as to the cause of death. Doubt they would come up with anything, but obviously, huge scandal. After that, do the successors keep getting killed since they’d probably be the same or worse, or what happens? What would happen in response to that? Would they rename the party, launch further investigations, would they attempt to dissolve the party? Would they attempt to believe in different ideals out of a kind of fear or natural selection, or what? Would they all just devolve into extremely conspiratorial thought as they desperately tried to ward it off?
I mean, if they figured it out, then they might even just start putting them out under aliases or fake names or something.
What happens when the government figures out who is in possession of the death note and arrests them/confiscates the death note? I don’t know what’s scarier, some rogue nobody with the death note or the United States Government.
I mean the government pretty much already has a death note, of a kind. If you’re not Gary Webb, then they could always just slip some shit in your water main or whatever, or otherwise just kinda kill you however they want. So it’s not all that useful for them to have, other than being cheaper and maybe making some political assassinations much easier.
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