Good for him. That said, he is the most low-energy game show host I have ever seen. When my daughter was first born, we didn’t have much to do, so we would watch daytime TV and his hosting on Let’s Make a Deal is just terrible (if he’s still doing it). It sounded like he was bored and didn’t want to be there every episode.
Sorry, I had to rant about Wayne Brady for a second.
I wonder if it’s just bad direction? Wayne Brady is one of the funniest people I’ve seen on TV - but I haven’t seen him hosting anything. So it can’t be him. It has to be someone directing him.
Agreed. He can sing jokes on the spot and dance anyone into a corner if left to his own devices. Bad acting isn’t coming from him. It would have to be stamped out by someone else
I saw one episode, but now that you mention it, yeah that’s the vibe I got as well. It felt like he was trying to emulate Howie, but it might have just been really boring.
The fascists aren’t stupid. They see the writing on the wall so they’re moving on. Completely expected and even if Trump gets the death penalty the threat is by no means gone. Trump is a symptom, not the disease itself.
There’s a distinction to be made between the fascists—the people in power pushing fascism—and the people voting for it. The latter are ignorant and stupid. The former are wringing the country dry for money and power.
Absolutely. I was talking to a friend the other day and he suggested hiring a hitman through crowdfunding to shoot Macron. I told him, Macron is just a symptom. This hydra has a bunch of other heads ready to sprout, you’ll get life for nothing
Additionally, a leader is just a tool used by a collective. The collective is in power, not the leader. Trump is no longer useful to them so he is being replaced, just like how a medieval king who fails to please his court of nobles is overthrown for a king that can.
Whether you can overthrow a leader simply depends on if you’re part of the collective they serve or not. The reason the general public can’t get rid of corrupt politicians or near universally hated people like Bezos or Elon, is because the collective that appoints them is not the public, but much like the medieval king, they only have to answer to a small group of modern day nobles (AKA the corporations, investors, and ultra rich in general).
It’s the ruling class, not the individual ruler, that calls the shots. Always. Because a single person can never enforce their rule alone, it requires a group that collectively has sufficient power to enforce their collective rule.
“If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny.”
An analogy I like: If you have a toxic, dangerous plant in your garden, like the Gympie Gympie maybe, do you remove it by snipping off the leaf bud at the very top, or do you pull it out roots and all?
I think that my problem is that I don’t agree with the analogy between the tree between the human. Every human, I believe, have a context to find personal change. And GimpyGimpy trees do not. And that is why I disagree with the premise.
“Your Honor, I just can’t face the consequences of my actions. Of course, my son is a monster and all of my enabling actions through money and power has caused this monster to grow into what we see her today, but, have you thought about what kind of message this sends to the wealthy?
I’ll be outside kicking puppies until your decision is rendered.”
I have to say I just don’t understand this one. Surely if you’re bigoted against someone with different preferences than you, you’d want to call them a psychological issue, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t this ban contradict their hatefulness?
The state wants to ban all mention of gender and sexuality in schools because they don’t think children need to learn about that (even though that’s real life). Sexual and gender issues are a necessary part of the AP psych curriculum, therefore, teachers cannot teach the complete course without facing legal ramifications. The state has failed to clarify this so nothing has been resolved.
It really is infantilizing kids of high school age to make them deliberately ignorant (and therefore reject) people who have different preferences. It’s horrific and is doomed to fail. The real world has a way of catching up.
Housing should NEVER have been part of determining ones worth or wealth etc. People need places to live…fuck this shit. Idgaf about people that boohoo about selling their home later in life when soooooo many of us can barely afford a rental in shitty areas these days. I have zero sympathy for any owners concerns as I can’t even own and I make more money than I ever have in my life. Can’t win vs the rich bastards that swoop in and pay 100k above asking price and just destroy any chances many of us have at just having a home and a life. Fuck your “starter home” boomer mentality. I want a home to die in someday and it can be the first home I buy if I ever get to
Yet another negative side effect of supply side economics. More money in the investor class than there are good investments. So they dump money in real estate which drives up the price.
We have to wait for the people that love Reagan out of nostalgia to die off. Then we can tax the bloated investor class and have a healthier economy.
It’s more a symptom of artificially low interest rates. A lot of the money currently buying up places to rent them would happily buy mortgage backed securities instead, but that market bottomed out when rates were 2-3%, so they bought property directly instead.
It’s going to take time, but eventually some companies will prefer the low risk 7-10% MBS vs managing property to get roughly the same return if you’re lucky.
Democrats could rinse and repeat this political strategy to multiple white house victories. Create policy that benefits common people while showing republicans as desperate to a holes that want to stop the help at any cost.
We should make owning residential, single family real estate for commercial purposes illegal. You own it, you live in it, don’t live in it, don’t own it. That would make gobbling up houses and renting them out unprofitable and force cities to open up multifamily development
That sounds nice in theory but what happens when you want to sell your house?
The only potential buyers would be people who either currently rent or are ready to sell their old house as soon as they buy yours.
What if someone wants to fix it up first? Nope, they can’t do it. It will cut out the flippers but we’ve also just cut out all the renovators and restorers.
We could do something like this (and it may not be a terrible idea) but there will definitely be a cost. If we add that law, all the people who currently own homes (that includes both investors and owner occupiers) will see the value of their real estate holdings drop. In the US, over 65% of people own their homes and for most of them, their home is their single biggest asset. Richer people can diversify more so while this law wouldn’t hurt the 35% who don’t currently own homes, it will disproportionately affect the poorer end of the 65% homeowners (who have proportionately more of their savings tied up in their home).
If we don’t also address that problem at the same time we’ll create a cohort of people who can’t afford to retire because we killed their plan of downsizing when their kids move out and living off the difference.
The only potential buyers would be people who either currently rent or are ready to sell their old house as soon as they buy yours.
What if someone wants to fix it up first? Nope, they can’t do it. It will cut out the flippers but we’ve also just cut out all the renovators and restorers.
Not at all. They can buy and renovate all they want. They just have to sell it afterwards rather than rent it out.
We could. Why would anyone want to make those investments once we’ve cut off all their profit potential?
Investors chase profits. We can cut off their profits but when we do that 2 things happen; some of them just leave the industry and some of them break the law to try to get around the regulations. Almost nobody just eats the loss and continues investing.
We didn’t cut off all their profit potential. It’s just limited.
I don’t really see the problem with this hypothetical. Small time flippers are unaffected. 10% or whatever profit is still profit. If it disincentivizes big commercial flippers or investors because they can no longer make “enough” profit, good, that’s the point.
The problem we see when we try to implement price controls is that they inevitably lead to shortages. The oil caps in the 70s are a famous example but the NYC rent controls were just as bad. The standard practice if you wanted an apartment was to look in the newspaper for open house listings that day. You would show up before the open house starts with at least 1 months rent plus first and last months rent as security deposit, in cash. If you liked the place you signed within the first half hour. If you waited someone else took the apartment.
Part of the challenge is that it’s not as simple as a 10% profit cap. What if someone owns a house for 2 years? Do we cap it at 20% profit? Do we index the allowable profit to inflation and then add a “reasonable” offset? Do we want to allow different profit caps for different renovations? (maybe we don’t want to treat swimming pools and solar panels the same way?) How long do you need to live in a house to consider it owner occupied?
As those regulations get more and more complicated you end up with a ton of loopholes. The more you do that the more profitable regulatory arbitrage becomes as a business model.
In general, tight margins favor large companies over small firms. They can operate at such a large scale where they can thrive off of profit margins that would starve small businesses. That’s the general issue with mega-retailers. They operate on single digit margins. Mom and pop can’t streamline their operations enough to survive on those margins.
Our housing stock needs both growth and maintenance. That comes from investment. If we push the private sector out of those investments without replacing them we’ll just end up with a crumbling housing infrastructure. If we cut large businesses out of it government would likely need to take up the slack. And to be clear that government intervention would need to be massive. The real estate market is huge and if we cut out the private sector we will definitely need to raise taxes, by a large amount, to cover it. That’s not off the table but we should walk into a decision like that with eyes wide open.
Why would anyone renovate a property if it’s just gonna sit on the market out of reach of potential customers? I would hope that investors would be smarter than that. Like we’re saying, homes should be for living, not for investing. If there’s no pressing need to renovate, then great. Don’t. Whoever wants to buy it as is now can. And if they want to they can renovate what they want at their own pace.
I’m assuming OP intends to specifically exclude rental companies. As near as I can tell this plan would also exclude individual renters. Not sure how that would play out if someone wanted to defray the cost of their home by renting out a room or subdividing their home.
Do you not maintain the things that you own just because there will never be a day where it is worth 10x what you paid for it?
Btw I really want to meet these flippers and landlords who are maintaining their homes. Every time I have dealt with one they are obsessed with making it look like the house is great, not actually maintaining it. Oh wow you sprayed cookie dough smell before showing it, hey check out that black mold in the basement that stupidly has fucking sheetrock.
I live in a rented house, and I’ve rented out a house I owned because I wanted to move and I was underwater on my mortgage. I get where you’re coming from but I do think there should be exceptions. Maybe just capping the rent at 110% of the mortgage payment or 0.5% of the appraised value would be enough to allow some rentals while discouraging people to buy houses just to rent them out.
How about instead of banning it we heavily disincentivize it? After 2 properties you pay 50% in property tax. This allows people to rent out homes to college kids and people saving for a home, without allowing vultures to pick at the bones of the middle class
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