For anyone interested in giving aid, or who needs aid, I found this Maui disaster coordination spreadsheet shared on mastodon. There's both on-island resources and places to donate online listed.
When the cybertruck was first announced I was interested solely due to how unique it was, and for taking it out into the wilderness for camping with a giant battery. Now, I won’t even consider even owning anything with the Tesla name. No way in hell.
Yeah. It is well worth watching Simone Giertz’s “Truckla” videos. She took her tesla (one of the sedans) and basically turned it into an el camino style “truck”. Has a few problems (it leaks when it rains… which may not have been her fault considering it is a tesla) but looks surprisingly “fun” and is actually a fundamentally better design as it would allow tesla to reuse frames and production processes… the same way every single other company does it. Pop a lift kit (because everyone knows a truck that you have to strain to lift stuff to load it is better?) and you are good.
Would even appeal to all the liberals who want a truck for hauling but don’t want to drive a giant f150 to compensate for penis envy. Which is probably why musk went from “That’s cool. You should come to the cybertruck event” to basically uninviting her (I forget if she was just specifically told to not bring Truckla or had to sneak in entirely).
I had access to a WeWork office for a while. It was fine for solo work or getting a couple of colleagues together for quiet conversations, but their meetings rooms sucked. There was no way to discuss or whiteboard anything confidential in one since the walls were all clear glass and the soundproofing was nonexistent. The whole setup felt like it was created by someone who was going for a ”cool startup office” aesthetic but hadn’t ever actually worked in one.
We were looking at a wework and I asked, why don’t the space between different companies get tinted glass or dividers and the sales guy straight out told me this is the environment we are building here.
What. Where is my organisation’s privacy?
At least my other office could have a personal room for your company even if the meeting rooms were shit.
How do you ban nicknames? What if they just state this is the name I prefer to be called? People named William being called will or bill, is that a nickname? Why are Republicans so damn stupid? Mfers trying to block porn hub like most the Internet isn’t filled with porn.
I sometimes review the FBI ECAP page to see if I recognize anybody, and even with much of it redacted it’s still horrible to look at. I can’t imagine what investigators who have to view child abuse go through just to try and save them.
Renting is the right choice for some people. Corporations have to obey stronger laws than mom and pops and are in my experience more likely to keep the houses updated.
The Mom and Pop owners have less resources to handle if you suddenly break your lease and leave due to crumbing conditions so it’s in their best interest to keep their properties updated.
Corporations often will ignore your complaints, and then just absorb the costs for a couple months until they can move in someone else into the same broken property. Corporations do not care when it comes to their properties, while individual owners do care because there are actual people behind them.
Also, regardless if “renting is the right choice for some people”, the housing shortage is due to corporations buying up single family homes with the express purpose of renting them, which pushes potential owners out of the market entirely.
Also too, mom and pop landlords often hold property as a means of retirement savings, so that when they go to cash out and finally retire, the house is worth something as opposed to a neglected pile. Obviously this isn’t true across all property owners that rent out, but it isn’t uncommon.
Just a single data point but as soon as a corporation bought my apartment complex they “attempted” to illegally increase my rent through hidden fee increases. They also “accidentally” sent me the wrong leases with the rents increased multiple times.
If I need to sue a corporation for something like this, it’s going to be a lot of time and effort for me but nothing for them so they can essentially get away with the illegality. Mom and pops it’s a lot of time and effort for both of us so it’s in both of our best interests to do things by the book.
Yes, renting is absolutely the right choice for some people. I completely agree. That is why I never said apartments shouldn’t exist or that people couldn’t own multiple homes to rent out. However, I think people who own multiple homes should be taxed higher on them.
Housing should not be a retirement vehicle. It should be a basic human right.
Also, I don’t think it’s true that corporations have to obey stronger laws than mom and pops. I’m pretty sure rental laws are just rental laws, and corporations just have lawyers who make sure they are following all applicable laws. I could be wrong, though.
This would be the biggest game changer for our country. Let corporations own all the apartments they want but keep them out of single family housing. There’s no reason for corporations to hoard and sit on housing, letting them sit empty and raising the prices of the occupied ones. Single family Housing should not be an investment opportunity for corporations.
Let’s bring down housing prices, and people will have a hell of a lot more money to spend on other things to keep our economy moving.
Then after that let’s do Healthcare and Education.
I live in a house that was sold at below market rates, under the condition that I will also sell to the next homeowner at a below market rate, there is a fixed equity gain each year to cover general home owner costs. I own the house, the city owns the land the house is on, HOA covers outside upkeep like roofing, window cleaning and driveway maintenance. This is known as a Community Land Trust.
There is no reason this method of housing can’t also be applied to folks that live in an apartment. Fuck corporations they shouldn’t own anything.
Just tax any home other than your primary residence at 100% of the assessed fair market value per year. Hell, make it 100000%. This includes apartments, condos, townhomes, mobile homes. It would solve a lot of problems real quick. Some “real estate moguls” might have to find a real job for once in their life but it will be good for them. I hear they like to hustle.
TBF I’ve considered selling my Model 3 because of his Nazi bullshit. I won’t, though, because it’s just too much hassle and there’s not really many alternatives on the market. My next car very likely won’t be a Tesla, though.
This will have much less of an effect on housing prices than people wish. The core problem there is lack of supply, not a handful of foreign oligarchs.
Foreign oligarchs affect supply, and I don’t think we have any idea how much. Corporate owners are probably a bigger chokepoint on supply, but domestic wealthholders are probably a big player as well. We need a variety of rules in place; enforcement of any of them will increase supply, but that mostly benefits whoever’s left in the list above. If we crack down on the biggest supply problem, the next biggest one will buy up the excess.
If we actually want private homeowners to take precedence, we have to make it extremely difficult for anyone to own multiple homes, corporation or not, wealthy or not, foreign or not.
To your point, this rule, whether it becomes an enforceable regulation or not, isn’t even targeted at increasing supply. It’s targeted at preventing money laundering.
To your point, this rule, whether it becomes an enforceable regulation or not, isn’t even targeted at increasing supply. It’s targeted at preventing money laundering.
Oh I know; that was aimed more at the people talking about corporations owning housing, as if that's particularly relevant. I'm quite skeptical that the corporate boogeyman is really a meaningful target when it comes to housing costs though. We've been drastically underbuilding for decades now - with quite a lot of that directly coming from extremely onerous zoning laws. The sheer fact of the matter is that in most American cities (where people actually want to live - empty shacks in rural Nebraska are not particularly helpful here), there are far more people who want to live there than available housing, and the inevitable result of this is that the wealthiest people are those who get to live in them. This will be the case regardless of whether the housing is owned by a corporation or a mom and pop. The fundamental problem is lack of supply; anything that doesn't address that will not meaningful reduce housing prices and is at best a band-aid.
There are 16 million vacant houses in the US. Even if half of them are unslavagebale, thats still enough to house the entire homeless population of the US ten times over. I don’t think its a supply issue.
And are those vacant houses in places where people want to live?
In NYC, for example, the vacancy rate is a bit above 2%. Vacant houses in Oklahoma have zero relevance to homeless people in NYC. It also has to be considered that a lot of vacant residences are only temporary; either caught up in legal issues or briefly empty while the owners find tenants. But again, geography is critically relevant here. Vacant properties only help if they're in places where people actually want to live and where jobs are available. It doesn't matter how cheap a shack in Nebraska is if there's no job around beyond farming.
Only a third of those are in the 'other vacant' category that represents housing that's not being used for any purpose. The other two-thirds are currently for rent or sale, have completed that transaction and are awaiting actual occupation, or are seasonally used.
I wouldn't be opposed to a tax on season homeownership, but that's only 10,000 units a city of 800,000.
The real question to ask is why the hell is it literally illegal to build anything other than a single-family home in 38% percent of the city's land, nearly two-thirds of land zoned for residential purpose?
Sure, snapping your fingers and making those ~30,000 units come on to the market would have a small effect, but it pales in comparison to how much supply could be added if such a huge chunk of the land wasn't legally mandated to be single-family homes.
Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Providence, Pheonix, OKC, Memphis, St Louis, Detroit, Houston and Cleveland are all in the top 20 by percentage of vacant houses and NYC is #22. This problem is not limted to small rural areas at all. The vacancies are spread across the whole of the country.
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