This smells like bullshit. I mean, if they define “Beverly Hills” as a city, I can see where it might be literally true, but I wouldn’t call even the cheapest house in Beverly Hills, Scarsdale, or Paradise Valley a “starter” home. There’s homes in the LA, New York, and Phoenix metros under $3-400k, if you’re not so choosy about the neighborhood.
From a canadian perspective, it sounds believable. About 10 year ago, you could get a new build on half an acre for 350k in my hometown. Today the oldest, run down, needs lots of renovations houses in the city on a quarter acre are going for over 400k. Those 350k new builds are easily into 700-900k range.
My biggest mistake in life was not buying a house fresh out of high school, but i was an “idiot” who looked at housing as a place to live, not an investment.
Beverly Hills is literally a city. It is autonomous from the Los Angeles city government. It has its own government and its own laws.
And do please show me where the L.A. homes under $400k are. There weren’t L.A. homes that cheap outside of Watts when we lived there over a decade ago and I’m not even sure about Watts.
But that’s my point: some cities do not have any “starter” homes, at all, and defining a “starter home” as just the bottom third of every municipality is misleading bullshit. It implies that you need $1M to buy a home, and you don’t.
I agree that home prices have gotten crazy and unaffordable for many. I just want to have a realistic discussion of what that means so we can work on realistic solutions, and “you need $1M mortgage just to get your foot in the door” doesn’t help.
Oh, okay. Sure. If you want to live in the middle of the SFV and are okay with a 3-hour commute, it’s doable. I don’t think you realize how big L.A. is. It took me well over an hour to get from NoHo, which is in the SFV, to the guy I bought weed from in Canoga Park, which is next to Winnetka. But sure. Go out far enough and the homes get marginally cheaper.
I think we’re working with different definitions for ‘starter home.’ To me, ‘starter home’ is a real estate agent’s euphemism for ‘undesireable shithole.’ It is a home you expressly do not want to live in long-term. It’s temporary housing to build equity while you’re young, able to sacrifice living standard and comfort, and waiting to earn enough to upgrade to an actually desirable house.
From the goalposts you’re moving, it sounds like you think a starter house is somewhere affordable that you’d be willing to move into today and live indefinitely. And yeah, that’s probably going to be unavailable to most people. Most people don’t get to live in their dream house in an ideal neighborhood. Never have.
The areas where these starter homes are so expensive are areas with big disparities in income. Let’s look at the Bay Area, with all that tech money. There must be some people who can afford those prices. They are probably the ones making good money in the tech sector there. But then all their local services are provided by lower-paid people who can’t live there.
What happens when all those tech workers have kids? No matter where they send their kids for school, the teachers at that school can’t afford to live there and probably have 90 min commutes each way just to find one of those “starter” homes to live in. Ditto for the librarians, and bus drivers, and day care providers. Even the grocery store clerks can’t make enough to afford to live there.
This is the opinion of someone completely unfamiliar with the current situation of housing, how we got here, or quite frankly economics in general.
If the beginning and end of your understanding of this issue is supply/demand, you need… NEED to understand that you are objectively incorrect through lack of info. It is not a difference of opinion, you are flat out spittin some stup’ rn
A chinese owned company, by chinese law, is the CCP’s bitch. An american owned company, by contrast, at least has the chance to refuse government requests, not that they always do.
They can already buy it. They are already getting it! Look at ALL of the latest televisions on the market - they require you to accept user agreements to basically suck the life out of you. They listen, report what you watch, how long you watch it, when you change channels, it is really unbelievable. And cars are doing it too! How fast you drive, what you are saying. All of the Google and Apple Home Pods, Amazon’s Alexa products. It is a joke. Except it is not! I think it is a competition for information between big companies backed by big governments.
You’re talking past the other guys point. We all agree that the CCP sucks, but just going after tiktok doesn’t solve the problem when they can just buy user data from a broker. You need to go after all surveillance adtech if you want to keep entities like the CCP from buying that data anyway.
Tiktok isn’t special here, just about every online advertiser will run whatever campaign you want as long as you pay their prices so you have to go after all of them to resolve the issue. Tiktok has CPC ties, yes, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg if you’re serious about the national security risk of adtech.
Edit: if you really want to go after manipulation of public sentiment you’ll also need to mandate disclosure and auditing of social media feed and advertising algorithms to a regulatory agency with extremely heavy fines (say X million $/day) for violators. That’s about the only way you can actually stop the sort of behavior the CCP is engaging in on tiktok.
Adtech itself is an entirely bigger ball of wax, if you want to reduce adtech’s social influence you’re going to have to take ownership of private user data out of the hands of advertisers and give it back to people themselves.
Is it really such a stretch to say a Chinese owned company managing the feeds of the most active social platform would use that platform to sow division and hatred in the US?
Isn’t that already happening by American companies? Data is being sold for pennies to the highest and lowest bidders, which are probably not all domestic interests.
I think that’s the biggest thing here that defenders of TikTok need to understand. The Chinese think it’s worth the West having but not worth them having it. What should that tell people about their purposes?
Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms are used for exactly the same purpose, all you need to do as an adversary is place an ad buy and you’re plopped right into user feeds.
You’ve got the right idea that adtech is a national security risk and should be treated as such but the solution can’t stop at just “tiktok and the CCP bad” - the solution needs to be a whole lot bigger.
US companies have seen similar criticism, antitrust suits, and billions in fines.
It is true that US tech companies have horrendous practices when it comes to data privacy and security, and that the US needs better federal regulation similar to GDPR to protect the consumer. This must be corrected.
It’s also true that the location of the parent company of a social media platform does not protect that platform from bad actors and adversarial abuse. See: Facebook in 2016
However, there is a big difference between selling bits of redacted data to ad companies, and providing raw database access to a foreign adversary with malicious intent.
Add to that the fact that kids/teens use tiktok more than any other platform, and their habits are exposed without their knowledge or consent.
The possibilities are endless, but to name a few concerns:
The CCP is using this app as a social engineering experiment to attempt to influence public opinion in the next generation of Americans.
Imagine how much easier it will be to influence the next generation of US politicians who have no privacy whatsoever, and whose thought patterns are well documented.
Imagine how much easier it will be to influence the next generation of US politicians who have no privacy whatsoever, and whose thought patterns are well documented.
We’re already dealing with the aftermath of this with US Corps evidenced by the destruction of unions and workers rights if you replace “privacy” with “education.” Why is privacy important
One of the biggest lies I see is this foreign adversary being a bigger threat than the endless local adversaries (capitalists) that are actually destroying this country. The Chinese didn’t destroy the healthcare industry, nor rail, energy, telecommunications, airline, financial industries. They have not suppressed the regulating of the internet, religion in politics, nor have they aided to the degrading of education, social security, disability support, or our laws against bribing politicians.
US companies have seen similar criticism, antitrust suits, and billions in fines.
Nah, they haven’t, otherwise we’d have laws (regulations) around them that would prevent them from, say, in the tech industry, distributing our data.
…there is a big difference between selling bits of redacted data to ad companies, and providing raw database access to a foreign adversary with malicious intent.
We know of techniques to pull out excess data from claimed “anonymized” datasets. Can you prove this data is redacted more effectively than that? Can you prove that they are only selling to ad companies? Can you prove it’s more malicious intent?
The answer is no, because we already avoided regulating this industry due to internal malicious actors.
Given how prominent an ally the U.S. is, the rise of the alt-right and increasingly fascistic tendencies lends a legitimacy to that viewpoint I’d rather not see. I naturally don’t put sole blame on the U.S. for the western sphere leaning more and more fascist, but it’s certainly set a precedent making it easier for others to follow.
To be fair, even thought that’s not needed with this guy, what he could actually mean is that he doesn’t give a crap who anyone votes for in 4 years since its not going to be him anyway, and for him he is the only person that counts.
But yeah, all the other theories are also plausible unfortunately.
Just remember the DoD have the troops and get all the budget money, the VA have the veterans that don’t get shit! If the DoD budget didn’t have to go up every year then maybe we could actually have money for other things.
InB4 “WhY DiDn’t hE Do iT WhEn hE HaD ThE MaJoRiTy?” Because he’s calling for constitutional amendments that require a 2/3rds support in Congress and the SCOTUS may finally be disliked enough to get some GOP members to support reform, especially if it comes with limiting Biden’s own immunity.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
Removing threats to democracy because that democracy is so flawed that it gave you the power to do so legally, and then using that power to eliminate the ability for it to be used again, is heroic.
I mean the critique behind “why didn’t he do it when he had the majority” still applies: calling for a constitutional amendment is ineffectual. There’s no way a constitutional amendment is going to happen in today’s political environment.
Also the court reform he’s proposing isn’t a constitutional amendment, but since he waited until he didn’t have a majority, that can’t happen either.
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