The law caps annual transfers of so-called “excess defense articles” at a total value of $500 million a year. But the same law doesn’t dictate how much value the president assigns to a particular weapon. He in theory could price an item at zero dollars.
Oh, Christ. While I appreciate looking for unorthodox solutions, that's a court case tugging at its chain.
Yeah; reading the article it would seem "arguably legal" is probably a lot more accurate than "perfectly legal"
Now, there is a caveat in the EDA law. All weapons must be given away “as is, where is.” In other words, the U.S. government legally can’t pay for shipping.
But another caveat is that any weapons in Germany are excluded from this rule. Biden could ship those DPICMs to Germany aboard a few sealift ships and then declare them as excess to need before having the U.S. Army drop them off somewhere the Ukrainian armed forces would have no trouble retrieving them.
I mean, you can call this legal but when you're paying to ship equipment you've clearly decided is excess before declaring it "excess" in an attempt to get around the clear intent of the law...
Basically this comes down to: [The Executive Branch could use an arguably legal method to send to Ukraine 4 million 25 to 50 year old cluster shells that have been determined to be unreliable and unsafe]
I’m no expert but it seems to me like it’s basically the kind of thing that is only technically legal only because nobody has been stupid enough to push their luck. If someone did try to do this they’d likely still be challenged legally in order to set a precedent, so I’m guessing it’s not like Biden could do something like this and get away with it scott free.
I’m no expert but it seems to me like it’s basically the kind of thing that is only technically legal only because nobody has been stupid enough to push their luck.
That has been the Trump administration (and post-presidency) playbook since 2016, and it has worked out remarkably well for them (and shown how flimsy many of our laws are). I say send it and let the chips fall where they may. If the courts end up deciding “yeah, that’s illegal” it’s not like they can get the shells back, unless they want to remove them piece by piece from exploded Russian equipment and Russian soldiers. They just won’t be able to use that tactic again. It’s not blatantly illegal now.
And setting precedent might just be good so that the law is that much stronger. Those shells might end up somewhere else someday if this opportunity is not taken.
The fact that it’s part of the Trump administration playbook indicates that perhaps it is not a great way to run a country and isn’t something that should be emulated.
Could you imagine Republicans letting that happen if there was any way they could stop it? I’m guessing they would try every possible avenue to stop it.
Presumably they’d get the manufacturers to sue for the damage to their ability to set prices when the president is literally saying that their shit is worth nothing.
The U.S. Army years ago determined that these DPICMs—produced in large quantities between the 1970s and 1990s—are unreliable and unsafe, as any particular submunition has up to a 14-percent chance of being a dud.
The Army around 2017 declared a requirement for a new cluster shell with a one-percent dud rate. “Rounds now in the U.S. stockpile do not meet the Office of the Secretary of Defense's goal,” wrote Peter Burke, then the service’s top ammunition manager.
Their shit is worth nothing. It's not even being manufactured any more.
See I know you’re trying to give me valuable information about my point but what I just read is that Ukraine is gonna be pulling the Darktide Ogryn maneuver and start launching crates of the dud shells instead of actually using them as munitions.
More seriously, I was talking more about manufacturer’s current products rather than their stockpile stuff. The argument would go that devaluing any product they’ve made does damage to the demand for all products they still make.
It’s a stockpile reserved in case US military needs it. Its value is the replacement value of that functionality, and that goes directly to American businesses
Why worry? Trump has made it perfectly clear that the president can apparently do whatever the hell they want to and good luck at stopping them. I believe Biden should take the same liberties. Perhaps I’ve just lost faith in the system.
People doing good things shouldn’t wait to find out if shitty people doing malicious things are told no. Just do the right thing already, face the consequences later. That’s what the shitty people do, and they usually get away with it.
You all are aware that the subversion of the constitutional state for what you deem to.be good reasons will end in the same weakening of said state no matter who did it, right?
Don't lose track of what's at stake by getting blinded by bipartisan feuds. You can't fight the enemies of law, oder and democracy by undermining law, order and democracy. That is literally the only thing one can learn from the Star Wars Prequel trilogy.
Right, like the other party cares about democracy.
Jesus Christ they’ve been gerrymandering everything they can, they ignore supreme courts orders to roll it back. They ban abortions, they try to go against people who travel to get it, they declare IVF emryos children… and that’s just the surface.
Just face it and be honest about it - there is no democracy. Majority of people are against Israel genociding Gaza. Democracy doesn’t care. Even the party of lEsSeR eViL does not give a flying fuck - DNC just says they can pick who gets to be nominated, since they are a private company.
Fuck all of that. Nobody cares about the majority of anything, except the capital. People have no value, not in the US.
But let’s worry about the optics of bipartisan support. What if the other party starts an insurrection???
This is not the right thing. The end of supporting an ally against Russian imperialism, fulfilling our promises, taking the cheapest route to safeguard our national interests, does not justify the means of the executive branch willfully misinterpreting government controls to circumvent fundamental checks and balances
You will bleed integrity with every one of those shortcuts you take. You say “let’s skip it and just do the right thing”. What can you not justify with that? You can excuse genocides, coups, war crimes. I don’t just have a problem with Trump’s motivations, but also his means. That approach, always correlated with populism, is foolish and always, always tends to oppression.
I’m not from the USA so I don’t have a dog in this fight but this seems like a mad approach to me. Think beyond the immediate short term.
In your place I’d be standing up for and strengthening your institutions and conventions; they aren’t perfect but the checks and balances are the only thing holding back people like Trump. If you don’t abide by the rules either that becomes the new normal and Trump-like figures will become commonplace and no longer be seen as an aberration.
I’m not from the US either, but I have heard of Project 2025. If Republicans actually implement what’s in it, whatever checks and balances were left will go right out the window.
The “I can legally do whatever I want when I’m president” argument he’s been making is relatively new and SCOTUS is looking into it. If Trump loses, he’s fucked. If Trump wins, Biden could potentially have him assassinated. Legally. And if I were Biden, I sure would. Why not if it’s legal?
He made the argument during an interview with David Frost years after he was president.
He made the argument when he ordered the bombing of Cambodia and Laos at the advise of Kissinger. He made it when he launched the War on Drugs, as an excuse for federal harassmemt and surveiling civil rights activists and anti war protesters. He made it when he coordinated with criminal cartels down in Florida and the surrounding Gulf States to rig elections, disenfranchise voters, and red bait the opposition.
He reiterated it during the Frost interview. But he never gave a shit about rule of law.
Trump is making the argument in court
An argument guys like Nixon and Reagan and Cheney never had to make because they were never prosecuted for their crimes.
I agree, in theory. But I like if he’d use that unlimited unitary executive power to… expand Medicaid into all the states that rejected it over the objections of those state governors. Then, maybe unilaterally abolish the $1.6T in outstanding student debts. And while he’s at it, nationalize the Petroleum industry and start ramping it down, so we can avoid climate change.
I feel like we can do the military surplus to Ukraine thing once we wrap the high priority stuff up first.
Yeah. Even if it goes unchallenged (it won’t), I’d rather not get this loophole codified into law for future fascists to utilize.
Not to mention if Biden says X item from Lockheed is worth $1, they are going to flip their shit. That could have a market impact on their perceived value, even if most people know it’s done to skirt the law. Or leave them open to getting very low-balled for those items later.
Well, “a court case might force us to do nothing, so we have to do nothing” doesn’t sound like a very good argument to me, but I respect the consistency of taking the same approach to this they did with universal student loan forgiveness at least
Actions have political costs, and optics could be the difference between Putin's lapdog and our current milquetoast administration.
I know which one I prefer, and, not coincidentally, that one is also better for Ukraine. So I do understand why saying "Fuck the law, we're gonna do it" hasn't been the first, second, or third choice.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to give these cluster munitions to Ukraine, than it would be to dismantle them. The USA won’t use them anymore, so is there a plan + budget for dismantling/destroying them? Historically they dumped large redundant stockpiles like this into the sea, but that’s now causing problems, so a more expensive solution is needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if blowing up big piles of the stuff, is cheaper than dismantling all these tiny munitions and at that point, it’s likely going to be the cheapest option (for real, not just on paper) to send it to Ukraine and let them deal with it in their way.
Israel represents a massive foothold in the region for the US, as well as facilitating all of those new oil pipelines running through Gaza. Palestinians are probably going to be wiped off the face of the Earth in order to keep that sweet sweet oil money in American politician’s pockets.
The day I stop trying is the day I just give up and move. If I were less stubborn of a person, that would have been years ago; now it’s “why should I leave when they’re the ones who suck?”
Not that we were ever great, but we didn’t used to be this bad. So sick of this goddamned culture war bullshit.
It would be great if police held themselves to a standard that helped the public, then we could have someone trustworthy to report to. As it is, they have destroyed the trust they had with me by failing to do even the most minor things to address problematic cops. It is clear the "problematic" cops for me are the kind of cops they actually want.
No thank you.
It's on the police to rebuild trust with us now, they've shown repeatedly they deserve none.
Edit: in Louisiana I would not be surprised that having fewer cops would reduce crime. This is a state that has repeatedly fought to keep racism alive and well. I bet there are huge issues there with the police terrorizing vs. serving many communities. So .. less cops on the ground sounds like more peace for a lot of people who've been suppressed way too much, seems like a win.
Don't like my opinion? Wake me up when the cops say "yeah, we fucked up and lost your trust for being gun happy cowards, we have changed the rules and we must protect and serve and any killing on our part is reviewed independently every time."
Have you read my comment? Have you thought about what I said? Have you considered the fact that the absolute majority of crime is reported by police departments?
Going off on a completely out of context rant that took you 5 minutes to write doesn’t do you any favors, only shows that you want to be mad, regardless of the reason.
I think where you miss stepped was when you said “no one to report crimes to” but people will still report the same number of crimes voluntarily to a fewer number of police. Instead it would be accurate to say fewer crimes are reported by police.
A quick google search shows, that crime stats are reported by law enforcement agencies. How do these agencies know about crimes? For most crimes, it’s gonna be because someone wrote a police report. Who writes police reports? The police.
It’s already well-known that data collected and reported by police departments is pretty horrid. Tons of data that SHOULD be kept and reported isn’t, and tons of policing agencies don’t want real stats getting out. Justice-related data has always been iffy.
So what I’m saying is we shouldn’t even trust too much what we do currently know. They’re not that solid of data for most justice related datasets.
That’s not really accurate. They still have log of calls/reports. Just not someone to deal with the problem. Dispatch just gives up if there aren’t enough officers?
In addition, Engoron ordered an independent body to monitor the Trump Organization for the next three years. However, he didn’t cancel its business licences, which would have effectively shut down its activities in New York.
Referring to the defendant’s behavior in his 92-page judgment, Engoron wrote: “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
He later added: “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”
Maybe if you are calling someone’s fraudulent actions borderline pathological, take away their business license. Just a suggestion. Nobody gives a shit that you are officially insulting them if your punishment is not backing that up.
This is what makes zero sense to me. How the fuck can the court determine that they committed fraud for decades and show no remorse at all, in fact the lied and doubled down and then the fuckers basically get a telling off!?!? All the courts and judges have treated trump far more leniently than he deserved when he’s deliberately turned his appearances into circuses and showed complete disrespect to the courts.
I’ve been hearing about how older generations always hate younger generations all my life. How I must be destined to grow in to some crochety old man by 40.
I gotta say these kids seem like they’re headed in a pretty good direction, they’re funny, they’re not taking shit, frankly it seems like it’s going pretty well.
They are also not fundamentally brain damaged by years of the inhalation of lead and then being irradiated by one of the worse nuclear disasters of all time.
I knew about the lead for Gen X. Are you talking about both Millennials and Gen Z not having been poisoned in their developmental years or are you referring to Boomers (and older), some of whom were irradiated and/or got hit by smog, etc. It sounds like you’re saying something also happened to Millennials otherwise, and I never heard about this.
No, just gen Z. Even a large number of the Millennial population were fairly exposed. Millennial generation starts in 1981, leaded gas didn’t become illegal to sell until 1992. And Chernobyl happened in 1986.
Oh that’s right, Chernobyl! There were staggered end dates to the sale of leaded gas though, so the years will vary more or less by continent. Nevertheless, your point remains valid even if the lead pollution was at its peak in the 1970s.
Yeah dude. I’m Xilenial, was told how I would grow up and be just like them. No, really, becoming old is a choice. My younger brothers are full on MAGA and hate-filled. They look and act older than I do by a long shot. I work with teams of Gen Z students and stay young by being around them.
You can age without becoming old. Some people chose to be old, and those types tend to hate younger folks and also hated the older people when they were younger themselves.
Right?! I was way more conservative in my teens and have gone way further to the left and less conservative as I've aged.
"When you buy a house you'll understand" ... yeah, nope, maybe it's the fact that it took 3 of us to buy the house instead of ONE salary being able to, but, nope - still not a crazy jackass who has no empathy just to keep my property taxes low.
ETA: Gen Z is great. I love the no fucks given attitude in the workplace and they're a fucking inspiration.
I think you’re right. Boomers were much more liberal than their parents but became neoconservatives once they got into housing ownership and the stock market. They then projected their own wants and desires on the next generations and assumed that everyone would follow them.
I was also very conservative as a teen, but that was only because my family lived in a shithole suburb and complained nonstop about California and liberals. As soon as I get away from them, my tune changed pretty much instantly.
There’s also such a thing as conditioning that we must recognize. Alt-right groups are actively targeting people for conversion and radicalization into the MAGA mindset.
Innuendo Studios has done a number of videos on this that are well worth watching. Like this one:
Anyone wondering why the rest of the world has begun taking the US less and less seriously and has begun distancing themselves from any decisions we make, you can thank this incompetent orange retard for the ludicrous amount of damage he did to the US’s soft power.
They need cop city to learn how to obscure evidence and leave no witness unsilenced in order to be able to do their jobs without fear of being held accountable, duh /s
How we ended up with a native cuisine inferior to the English is something I don’t get. It isn’t like the entire planet is injecting us with immigrants at all times.
Gotta get out of WASP neighborhoods, there’s tons of good American food developed (mostly by immigrants and slaves) over the hundreds of years since colonization. And it’s not like the native population was eating dirt.
The same can be said about provincial french cuisine. You are so used to a world of food chains that you can’t imagine a past history where EVERYTHING was regional.
I live on the east coast and travel to major east coast cities a few times a year for fun. Seeing people in NYC eating at like Chipotle or other fast food drives me bonkers.
I know some people are locals and that’s reasonable, but visiting a place like that and not eating the local grub seems so dumb.
That’s the sort of thing we eat down here all the time. What’s wrong with fried plantains? Oxtail is kind of hit or miss, but if you know someone who can cook it well… 👩🍳😘 Truly divine. And who hates marinated pork? It makes the best tacos.
There is literally no benefit to racism but a fucktonne of limitations and loss of opportunity. It really breaks my brain why people keep making it so central to their identity.
The suit details that Carano was required by Disney to meet with a representative from the LGBTQ+ group Glaad after online behaviour that was seen as anti-trans, yet she refused. She was then asked to meet with a group of LGBTQ+ Disney employees but again refused and was fired soon after.
Girl…you were put on a Performance Improvement Plan. You didn’t complete it. You were fired as a result. It would happen at my job, too. They don’t want to give money to people who will make them look bad. Most places don’t. You probably signed a lot of paperwork agreeing to do or not do a bunch of shit and then you did it.
Was that like…your first job or something?
Edit: I read this on here right before the Gina article. Elon Musk is such a trash person and hypocrite:
Per Bloomberg, these California workers were fired in 2022 after they circulated a draft of an open letter critical of CEO Elon Musk. The letter stated that Musk’s behavior in public was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment,” according to a New York Times report.
It also contained an allegation that the company wasn’t complying with its zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment. Although the draft letter didn’t specify the exact allegations, it mentioned “recent allegations against our CEO and his public disparagement of the situation,” per The Verge.
Also the demand she meet with queer coworkers was clearly an attempt to communicate that she was creating a hostile workplace for coworkers based on protected statuses.
And it should be noted that politics are intentionally not protected because otherwise black listing communists would be illegal
Filing a nuisance suit against her former employer is a great way to boost her career, and teaming up with a scumbag like Musk helps clarify her ethics for anyone who’s unfamiliar with who she is. Outstanding move, Gina!
She no longer has a career with mainstream studios.
Fascist bullshit is her career now. I assume she has another wackadoodle movie coming out soon. Or maybe she's the next mother of Elon's soon to be estranged children.
On the subject of Sorbo, apparently he had two small strokes during his time on Hercules and that's part of why he went off the rails so damn abruptly.
In other words they're following a playbook written by the brain-damaged, literally. By all means, go on.
As much as I agree with you logically, and also disagree with what she did, we shouldn’t encourage people to avoid lawsuits to address injustice they perceived. That’s how we ended up with #metoo. So many on the entertainment industry not rocking the boat as it could damage their career. Some were blacklisted for speaking out, so it was a real fear.
If it was a real injustice the same logic would apply and we should take that into consideration when we consider damages for real injustices.
I agree completely. I had the same concern as I was writing my comment, which is why I was careful to specify that it’s a nuisance suit. (Side note: autocorrect saved my butt. I can never remember how to spell “nuisance”.)
If someone rents you a house do they get to charge only the mortgage? What about repairs and other unforeseen expenses to keep it up? And if you pay for repairs that never happen, what then?
If people can only break even on renting, many just. They’ll sit in empty houses until market prices increases, exacerbating all of this.
What I’m saying is renting shouldn’t exist to begin with. People should not own more than one living place and that place should be the place that they live in.
"Gosh, I would love to pay the same amount or more to build no equity and have some shit bag landlord paint the walls white and claim he made repairs" said practically no one. Even if they did, there isn't a reason to maintain an insane system for the benefit of very few.
Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, created December 10th, 1948:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
I’m not going to get into the discussion about whether renting should or should not exist but I can get behind the idea that renting for profit shouldn’t be a thing.
OK. What does someone do when they move somewhere new and can’t afford to purchase a house? Or don’t want to purchase a place because they expect to live somewhere 6-12mo for a contract?
The solutions I’ve seen require a fundamental rethinking of the way housing works in the USA (and most places), where renting just turns into another way to build some amount of equity, and the property managers are under more democratic control. More of the process subsidized by the local government, in the same way that water treatment is.
Arguably it’s renting by another name, but the central point is to strip the profit motive out of it (some salaries are needed, but in a system with more regulatory oversight) and to allow the renter to get some financial benefit so they aren’t simply pissing money away.
Apologies in advance for that vague response: I’m not an economist or real estate expert, so I can’t back up that general idea with any kind of details or evidence it’s feasible.
Yeah, I agree totally. That’s a great idea. Lease-to-own or something similar. As a renter I’d love to build some form of equity. Because in the US the only real way to build equity or generational wealth is through owning property. Which makes real estate a VERY hot commodity to speculate in. Which is a huge problem for people who just want somewhere to live and built modest equity like everyone else has.
Public housing, rented at cost directly from the government. And you can stay in the house as long as you want, so it eliminates the “risk” of renting. Done. Solved it.
Now just fucking build some public housing please.
I think this is a good idea for public housing. BUT that is not what the vast majority of americans want to live in. Uniform apartments, townhomes or small single-family homes are not the norm and I’d hesitate to make the majority of future developments so homogenous.
And then you have the issue with government-provided housing as we’ve had in the past: underfunding, under policing, bad locations, NIMBY assholes, etc. We already have subsidized housing/rental assistance: Section 8. So this would be a constant battle to just keep it decent.
Public housing doesn’t need to be uniform or boring… that was mostly a result of the ideology of urban planners of the mid 20th century when most public housing projects happened. The government can contract a private developer to make a nice building, that is well located, and is not just for poor people. That seems so obvious, but it seems people are stuck by their own ideology and can’t even think a bit outside of what is, or has been.
And I’m not talking about subsidised, I mean PUBLIC. Owned by the government or by coops, councils etc. Built using federal money. Just having this around would decrease overall housing costs so much… the market would have to compete with the no-profit, cost only, rents of public housing.
And Amazon has done a lot of research and found you only need to control 8% of a market to control the pricing. The government just has to build enough public housing in major population centers facing rent crisis to own 8% of total housing there. And that’s it. Rent cost crisis averted. And thousands of jobs and GDP generated because of all the construction (add in extra infrastructure for better access to the public housing, and you got a real economic boom cooking — hint hint, it’s literally what China did lmao).
Sometimes I need / want to rent. Example, I had to repair the foundation of my home and needed a single family home to rent for my family while my home was being repaired for 6mo.
Hotels / motels / inns are a pretty reasonable use case. People need temporary housing for travel.
I don’t want to live in an area for more than 5 or 10 years, I want to rent. Buying a house is a huge fucking pain, and is always full of expensive surprises once you move and have the maintenance on you.
I could go on, but IMHO, there are a LOT more reasons why renting is actually useful, and I might want someone else to be on the hook for the mortgage and maintenance.
There are times that a corporate entity of some description is extremely useful. The issue is for-profit companies.
A simpler solution is to add a tax, based on the property value for for-profit companies. For niche situations, the effect of this will be annoying but not devastating. For companies dedicated to sucking money out of housing, it will hurt them badly. Maybe have it tick up 0.5% of the property a year till it’s 5%. Slow enough not to cause a massive shock to the market, but large enough to force a change.
An obvious example of a useful company owned housing situation is a set of apartments. However, here a non profit would work even better.
As for valid for-profit ownership, it does happen. E.g. I know of a veterinary practice that owns several houses. They used them to provide subsided housing to staff, close at hand. They also allow them to house mid to long term locum staff close to the practice. Everyone wins from this arrangement.
In denser areas, the only people willing to build skyscrapers full of housing are intending to be landlords. Even funding the construction of condos has become extremely rare because the cost to profit ratio doesn’t return enough to beat just buying ETFs in the market. If you can solve this problem for cities that desperately need to build housing faster and denser, then you can dissolve corporate landlords
I live in a very dense city, which means building residential towers is usually the only reasonable way to quickly increase housing density. And we desperately need housing.
Large buildings can cost billions to build. You need a government or corporation to organize around if you’re going to make that happen. And unless you’re China or the USSR in the 70’s, going the government route is going to be damn near impossible right now.
Let corporations build them, don’t let them own them.
If they build a 100 unit apartment building, don’t let the corporation just rent them all out themselves.
Force them to be sold to individuals. That keeps the overall condo prices competitive, and then people who buy them can then rent them out on an individual basis for those who prefer not to / can’t purchase a condo outright.
Limit how many residential units a corporation can own and incrementally increase taxes for every unit above that limit.
Limit how many corporations one person can own. No more of this bullshit 20 numbered companies in one person’s name to get around shitty business practices.
As I stated at the top of the thread, nobody builds condos in cities anymore because they don’t make enough money to beat the market. If I’m rich enough to build a skyscraper it better have better returns than buying an s&p etf. This is the key issue for cities. If you block corporate landlordship, they won’t build condos instead. They will build nothing at all and invest in other stuff.
A very easy solution is for the government to build public housing? Isn’t it rather obvious? It completely fix all things you talked about.
Buildings get built, rents are cheaper, and it doesn’t matter if the “returns” are lower than the stock market. The government doesn’t give a fuck about returns, they print the money.
Edit: and I also think it’s pretty fucking obvious why this easy simple and direct solution is not applied. Landowners and capitalists are in complete collusion. The classes are mixing in ways that they are indistinguishable now. And the government is completely controlled by capitalists. They will never cut their profits and means of control. They won’t allow it.
Public housing the US was historically federally funded and was for low income people. It was one of those liberal solutions that tries to solve something, but gets stuck in a system that is already racist, and then the whole thing is made worse by conservatives.
Social housing, where cities build housing themselves, can be a way out. Most cities don’t have a lot of experience doing this, so it’s going to have to start out with a few small projects. It can be mixed income instead of low income (which tended to support red lining).
Another possibility is for cities to use their leverage with developers to favor unionized shops. This may not be possible under existing state laws, however.
Definitely should be mixed income, and the planning for it is better handled more locally (neighbourhood/borough, city, town etc.). But it should be funded federally, cause cities can’t print money. All development they make has to be funded by taxes. The federal government doesn’t have to earn a dime, they can just print a couple hundred billion and distribute it to all the major population centers to develop public housing and infrastructure however they see best. That would work best imo
Cannot say I agree with that last sentence but unlimited profits from housing should absolutely be illegal. I’ve been dealing with an absolute shit show of a corporate landlord, one that uses realpage, and it’s really been eye opening how fucked these companies are. I 100% knew they were scumbag pieces of shit but I got a full dose of the lengths they’ll go to in order to make a buck. Just two of the many cost saving measures: letting me go without heat for 3 weeks and letting our elevators stay broken for 6 weeks. I’m convinced the only reason they fixed our elevators is someone must have finally gotten their lawyer on the phone to them.
Absolutely souless garbage humans work for these companies. They sleep fine at night knowing you’re paying a lot of money for an apartment you’re freezing your ass off in, have to struggle to get in and out of, whatever. They absolutely give zero fucks about the lives they’re fucking with.
having to be responsible for the actual property seems to be a good idea.
idk how it’s handled in germany, but i’m not aware of stuff this bad. i have someone in my family who has renters, and they either go fix stuff themselves or pay a professional if the heating’s acting up again.
and being a renter of someonecs privately owned apartment in a corporate owned house, i feel like being taken care of adequately.
Thanks for your response. I think that in the US one of our big issues is inconsistency. What I’ve described here is unprecedented for me until now but I’m sure many others have had much worse. The basic idea I think is that the bigger a company gets, the more they feel emboldened to get away with shit to save a buck here and there.
It’s insanely dehumanizing for someone to lie to your face and tell you their hands are tied and your broken heat will just have to stand for an unknown amount of time. My landlord before this was an amazing man who I will never forget. Many times he showed good will beyond what was required and you can bet your ass he would’ve had the heat fixed within a week at most even if he had to spend $10,000 to do it. In fact the heat did break once and he had someone there the next morning. Meanwhile the company with hundreds of millions in revenue refuses to spend a buck to expedite the process because they have the cheapest deal possible with some contractor who is slammed
The management in this building treats us like idiots who don’t matter. Despite repeated fuckups, everything is always “we’re doing the best we can”. If they were doing the best they could, none of these issues would’ve last longer than like a week and a half. The tenants here were damn near mutiny level it was so bad. People were posting notes with numbers to call and an exact count of how many days the elevators were out. It felt good to at least see people doing something to hold the assholes accountable.
Most homeowners don’t have to pay capital gains on their home when they sell. Thanks to tax legislation from the ’90s, a gain of up to $250,000 for a single tax filer or $500,000 for a couple filing jointly is exempt from tax. That’s providing the sale is of the homeowner’s primary residence and that they meet other requirements such as living in the property for two of the past five years.
That means if a couple bought a median priced home in 1987 for $100,000 and they’ve lived there as their primary residence and are selling it today for $550,000, the $450,000 gain from that investment is not taxed because it falls under the $500,000 exclusion to capital gains taxes.
However, if those same $100,000 homebuyers lived for 37 years in an area that has seen enormous growth in home values — as is the case for many parts of California — and their home now sells for $2 million dollars, that’s nearly $1.9 million in profit, of which only $500,000 is excluded from taxes.
If it was just a problem of paying more taxes then the argument would be bullshit. The main problem is buried at the end of the article:
A homeowner who keeps all the profit of a home that sells for $500,000, for example, may find that a condo in their same area, where they can age in place, is $450,000. After calculating realtor fees and closing costs, the profit hardly covers the new purchase, let alone provides any extra income for retirement.
This is the real reason they are not moving. They would be stepping backwards financially instead of stepping forward.
Land is mostly a set resource with new developments and cities slowing. Home development follows land and while there’s been a boom, overall it’s been slowing. As there are more people, demand for housing increases.
All of this drives cost of homes up. So the longer you are in a home, the more it and/or the land it worth. Usually outpacing inflation. So when you sell, it’s worth more. It’s an investment by default even for those people who own 1 normal-sized single family home. It was an investment even when housing prices were reasonable decades ago.
That it was an abject failure of an idea and most of these places were torn down. I’m not arguing that public housing is bad but I don’t think we’re capable of implementing it in a good way here in the US.
“The market” sets wages. My ass, the market is Billybob greedy asshat saying “I won’t pay more than this.” Then Timmyjoe fuckwit says “well the market has spoken, it would be stupid of me to pay more when Billybob is only paying x”
And for you theorists out there “supply of labor will affect wages” let me introduce you to the new excuse: “No OnE wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE!” Can’t hire at the shit wage that’s out there? Just complain no one wants to work!
Interesting. So there’s 2 main reasons and 1 knock-on effect on why Tokyo (not Japan, just Tokyo) has affordable housing.
They build a LOT of housing. Tons of dense housing which most other countries don’t match.
55% inheritance tax, no exemption. Meaning generational accrual of wealth from houses can’t happen.
The first one is achievable nearly everywhere and would be quite popular. Except with those who already own homes. Building high-density housing will lower housing prices for those nearby. The video covers this well.
The second isn’t going to work in the US. Homes are the #1 generational wealth is accrued and how people rise in economic standing. From paycheck-dependent to stable, etc. Trying to take that away without some other way to build wealth and especially without a national retirement system is going to be deeply unpopular.
Another aspect I found very interesting: Tokyo demolishes and rebuilds every house on average every 30 years. That’s wild to me. They build for safety but not longevity. No one wants a pre-owned house. Couple this with the inheritance tax and I imagine most older people will just sell their homes or pass down only a small amount. Japan’s Public Pension System makes this feasible as well and without that I can’t see this becoming viable in America.
I also wonder how wasteful that kind of demolition ends up being.
Extremely wasteful - and that’s to say nothing of the obvious climate impacts from said waste. It’s one hell of a drawback to what I would otherwise describe as a system that works pretty well.
It could be changed to penalize or disincentivize people from owning multiple homes through taxes. Like maybe tax the shit out of anyone that owns more than two in order to allow the middle class the chance to purchase a rental property but stop the ultra wealthy from from buying up entire neighborhoods.
The way my town does it is everyone pays the same rate, but you get a huge exemption on your primary home, so effectively higher taxes on investment properties
Condos generally aren't much cheaper than houses. They would have the same issue if their region's real estate was half as expensive. They would have had this problem 10, 20, 30 years ago if they were retiring. If you sell a house in an expensive area and want money left over, you either have to choose a shittier house/apartment to live, or a cheaper area.
They paid for the next place, including fees, and still have $50k in their pocket? How greedy does someone need to be, exactly, before we consider the behavior repugnant?
I think the issue is that with mortgage prices and the incredible costs of homes in California, capital gains tax comes into play for them when the vast majority of homeowners never even consider it.
So you have people with a large single family home wanting to sell and move into a small single family home (1-2bed) or even a condo and they end up with no benefit from doing so and potentially even an expensive mortgage. Essentially they are selling an Escalade to get a Civic and breaking even, which seems odd.
I think the capital gains tax exception should be expanded to be waived for single family homes under XXXX sq ft, with the above stipulations (living in the home continuously). It’s not these people’s fault their neighborhood shot up in price outpacing regulations meant to protect normal home owners.
Their only real out in this situation is to move away from where they’ve lived their whole lives.
Nope. No exceptions. You made money for doing no work, you pay taxes on that money. Plain and simple. Cap Gains tax rates are already absurdly low, so frankly anybody asking for a further reduced rate or exception is already a greedy pig not worth listening to.
I see you’ve never sold a house. If you do, have fun losing 15% of that value. The only way to prevent that is for your house to not accrue any value while you lived in it.
You can actually deduct the cost of any improvements you’ve made to the home. You can’t do much about inflation costs, but are you really arguing that it’s bad to only receive 85% of free money rather than 0% by not selling?
Except you aren’t just selling. You also have to buy. And if from the tax and high housing prices it’s a wash to downsize, there’s not nearly the incentive to.
High housing prices also mean a high selling price for you too and taxes being percentage based means there’s never a scenario where you wind up with less money than you would from selling a smaller, cheaper house because regardless of where you are, bigger houses sell for a lot more than smaller houses. The only scenario where this makes sense is if you sold a large home in a place like rural Oklahoma and moved to a shoebox in San Francisco, but that’s not what’s being described in the article.
If I’ve missed the point then why can’t you explain how big houses are selling for nearly the same as small houses to the point where people are breaking even going from 3000sqft 5 bedroom homes to a 1200sqft 2 bedroom? A 15-20% loss from capital gains over 500k isn’t going to do that nor is an additional 15% tax from California.
The only possible scenario where that makes sense is if you’re comparing a $500k home from a married couple to another couple with a home valued at 30% over $500k. For those people, they’re going to receive the same as the couple who had $500k in capital gains. This is a math problem so you can’t just waive it away with “my opinion is different and you missed my point.”
The example in the article is absurd as a single family home with property isn’t going to sell for slightly more than a condo unit in some giant complex. That’s why they had to rely on an example with made up numbers. If you look up a home their size in El Cerrito, just outside San Francisco, you’re looking at $1.6M while a condo is going for $400k. Surely they could afford a $400k condo with $1.37M in profit.
You haven’t presented any argument other than saying “you’re wrong,” and yes I absolutely disagree with the article based on real, verifiable facts. Cherry picking numbers? The numbers in the article are fictional. You can go check out Trulia or Zillow and see the selling price for a home that size and the purchase price of a condo in the same area.
The issue is that they sold a large home and bought a small home and had very little money left over. It doesn’t make financial political sense to do that. They might as well stay where they are. There is little incentive to downsize.
Part of the solution to the housing crisis is solving that incentive problem.
The have their new property paid for and also have a much smaller property tax bill and lower maintenance costs. There’s still plenty of incentive to downsize.
Paying taxes on profit might hurt a little, but it’s a good problem to have.
Maintenance costs are probably fairly minimal given how little wear and tear happens in an empty nest. And property taxes for elderly folks are usually frozen or nearly frozen in place - meaning the next buyer will be paying a much higher tax on the same house because they won’t qualify for those exemptions.
To the contrary - I own a large home in an urban area and it is filled with my children. But we don’t have to have a conversation - I was only pointing out the flaws in your logic. My tax bill will be $12k this year while my elderly next door neighbor’s will be a fraction of that. Our homes are identical (3k sqft over 3 floors). She’s not leaving because it would make little financial sense to do so. This is quite common.
Sounds like one of those people that doesn’t take a raise because it’ll put them in a new tax bracket. People that don’t know how the adult world works.
It’s a ridiculous scenario considering the real value of their home. They might as well have invented a scenario where these people only get $100k for their 3000sqft, 5 bedroom home and then have to pay $2M for a one bedroom condo on the bad side of town.
That’s a fictional scenario, though. Why would an entire house be selling for the same price as a tiny condo with HOA fees? These people have a huge house worth millions of dollars, so I’m confused why they would use a $500k sale price in their hypothetical scenario.
Sure those are made up numbers but they illustrate a real issue. Where i live, and I’m sure other high cost of living areas, it’s the land that’s expensive, in short supply. The actual house might be a much smaller part of that.
What that turns into is prices may be insane, but a house isn’t much more than a condo isn’t much more than a vacant lot. Then when you buy, taxes are reset to the new value, so property taxes will now be much higher and realtors commission will be insane. So they need to take a mortgage and take a cost of living hit on the taxes, then are clobbered by high interest. They may literally not be able to afford to downsize
Haha, I mean I get it… Giving away money to uncle sam sucks but I agree with your sentiment. They are coming out ahead, that house was an investment that is paying dividends. I am hoping to have that problem some day!
Contributing financially to the democratic society in which you spent the entire time of gaining monetary value able to vote which enabled the increase in value of your property? That’s the thing here, this isn’t throwing money away, and it isn’t imposed without your say. Taxes aren’t fun, and we don’t always like where they go, but as adults we should be able to respect them. They’re part of how our society functions and a necessary component of many nice things we need in order to prosper.
This long time anti tax attitude in this country is part of what destroyed our infrastructure, ruined our regulatory bodies, and contributed to our massive wealth gap.
To be fair, it wasn’t the attitude that destroyed the infrastructure. Despite people’s attitude toward taxes, they still paid. The problem is precisely that they don’t like where that money is going. In most cases, their taxes are just funding a trust fund baby’s extra paycheck while they sit in office and neglect their duties while discussing divisive politics to distract from the fact that they are robbing the American people. A lot of people aren’t against the idea of paying taxes, but rather America’s inability to appropriately spend money on the common good.
That attitude that the majority of taxes go to paying politicians is part of the issue. Yeah politicians suck and many are overpaid. The military is too. You me and everyone else knows these will be cut after infrastructure and welfare. Fighting for tax cuts then becomes “I don’t want to pay for infrastructure or welfare”. And seriously look at anti tax sentiments, they’re often anti welfare or anti government assistance.
Isn’t this where the boomers use a 1031 exchange and convert the large home into a smaller luxury condo for themselves and a few lower income units to rent out to struggling Millenials?
On the other hand; would you personally make that choice if you were in their situation? I am willing to bet you, nor any other reader, would not. While that doesn’t excuse the greed aspect of it; it does cast at least some light upon why they are refusing to sell and take a loss on it.
If you only paid $100,000 and you made $1,000,000; you’d have $900,000 profit; of which you’d probably only see ~60% to ~40% of, if Capital Gains taxes are anything near what I think they are. If we assume a “worst case”, where the Federal Government takes 40% and the State takes about 20% more, that means your tidy profit is only about $390,000. That means you’ve probably got to secure another $140,000 in financing on average to pick up a more modest $500,000 home (in today’s market) to retire in.
But villainizing the boomers isn’t going to solve the housing crisis easier either. We legitimately need more homes. We. Need. Them. Yesterday. So maybe the policy needs to lean towards bigger developments that cost less. We did it during WW2; where massive amounts of homes were built cheaply. We probably need to achieve that again, and do better than we did during a war that was diverting supplies away from the effort.
If you only paid $100,000 and you made $1,000,000; you’d have $900,000 profit; of which you’d probably only see ~60% to ~40% of, if Capital Gains taxes are anything near what I think they are. If we assume a “worst case”, where the Federal Government takes 40% and the State takes about 20% more, that means your tidy profit is only about $390,000. That means you’ve probably got to secure another $140,000 in financing on average to pick up a more modest $500,000 home (in today’s market) to retire in.
Capital gains taxes range from 0-20% Federally, depending on your income. In Cali, the addition is up to 13%
Which means that worst case scenario, you sell a property in Cali, you would pay 33% of the profiit above the original price of the house and the 500,000 exemption. So on a house you bought for 100,000 and sold for 1,000,000, you'd pay the awful, awful price of... 133,000, leaving you with a paltry $867,000.
Capital gains are capital gains not income (earned wages), so no they aren’t taxed as income which is why they’re called “capital gains taxes” and not “income taxes.”
Even the usage of the term “endgame” implies an almost sportsman like perspective on the legal battle for transgender rights, devoid of any acknowledgment that transgender people have humanity and that their actions will have dire consequences for real people. A literal battle plan for how to dispose of us. No vague language, no hand waving away accusations of genocidal intent. Point blank, openly asking, “How do we get rid of trans people for good?”
They refuse to acknowledge that trans people, that any trans person, benefits from acceptance and support and freedom to be themselves. In their ideal world, first they’ll deny our healthcare, deny our legal rights and protections from violence and discrimination, they’ll replace mental health care facilities with religious conversion therapy camps, and when all is said and done and trans people continue to exist in any shape or form they’ll resort to incarceration and disposal. They’ll make laws enforcing dress codes based on assigned gender and make it illegal to change your name to one not approved for your assigned sex. This is what they’ve been saying they want for years. If they could do this, they would without a second thought.
We’re the basis of the entirety of the post pandemic Christian conservatism movement. None of these people would even have jobs without us to scream about during the two minutes hate.
Important why the reference is valid as well, is that endgame is rhetorically near ‘Endlösung’ (ultimate solution) and ‘Endsieg’ (ultimate victory), meaning complete genocide as ‘solution’ to ‘the problem of the jews (existence)’ ( ‘Judenfrage’ ) and world domination as solution to the growing extremes of the Second World War.
Please don’t use ‘Endlösung’, ‘Endsieg’ and ‘Judenfrage’ in casual speech.
Americans don’t like talking about how Nazis came to power. We literally remove the first line from Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for” quote from school textbooks because it sympathizes with Socialism.
Neither they like to talk how a lot of Nazi discourse was based on American eugenics and the logistics of the holocaust were templated and inspired by the American genocide of Native American Indigenous people. In particular the use of concentration camps. Which the Americans copied and perfected during WW2 to imprison Japanese-American citizens.
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