• 3 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2023

help-circle


  • the second anyone was allowed to use houses as an “investment” to gain wealth we basically guaranteed this. obviously anyone with a lot of money tied up in housees is going to try and make their value go up. once we got multinational billion dollar conglomerates involved it became child’s play for them to make that number go up through infinite methods of varrying complexity carried out by thousands of people working together with billions of dollars behind them.

    this problem is inherent to a housing market that people are allowed to speculate on. we just need to make that stop entirely. limit house ownership. no one needs 100 houses. especially not companies. if that results in less rental houses than desired, we need to build more apartments. apartments are different beast, but if the cost of houses are lower then it will be harder to inflate rent if they can afford a house instead. this may result in some people who want to rent a house, but not an apartment, unable to find that. that’s not a big problem. they might just need to rent an apartment instead. certainly it’s much less of a problem then the current state of no one being able to afford housing.

    the rich don’t need this vector for growing their wealth. they have enough others and are doing quite alright at it. the world will function just fine without mult billion dollar corporations investing in buying properties for the sole reason that they think they can extract wealth without contributing anything. houses should be for living in, not for extracting wealth.







  • so what’s getting shot down are executive orders. unilateral decisions made by the President. they aren’t very strong and can basically be overturned by any federal judge. in the past we all pretended they judges were not partisan and that the judiciary was somehow above politics. recently there has been a strong reversal on that stance from our political right. in the past it was unusual for judges to overturn executive orders without good reason. right now it’s expected that this court specifically week more or less try to overturn anything Biden tries to do.

    originally the executive order was meant to be used sparingly and have very little power. that has changed greatly over a long time, but lately they’ve mostly been getting used to get past deadlock in the house and Senate. these days we more or less can’t pass any laws because the Republican party always has at least enough control to block one part of the process and had taken a stance of “block everything the Democrats do to make them look bad until we have unilateral control and can do what we want”. they just finished that plan.

    so lately legislation that can’t get past the deadlock created by bad actors in our checks and balances system. the balance against that which we had settled on in the past was executive orders. lately the thing that has changed is that Republicans stopped pretending the judiciary was sacred and started using it as another arm of obstruction. in the past it was understood that such a gross lack of decorum and breaking of political mores would cost a political their career. trump proved that wrong so now they can blatantly use partisan judges to obstruct anything worthwhile that might have snuck through.




  • sometimes i put in on my knees, but I’m almost never in a situation where i want to game, but don’t have a table.

    like, sure, i could spend $1000+ dollars on a mobile solution to compliment my desktop. or i can take my existing hardware and have a pretty good time with it while traveling or waiting for someone or something. it feels like people are trying to come up with silly reasons for this to not work. why would you think i would try to hold the phone in my hands too?

    how does needing to put the phone down defeat the purpose on not bringing an entire extra $1000+ dollar gaming machine with me? i mean sure, i could play 2 generations old games on a laptop for a lot less than that, but i haven’t spent a single penny on my mobile setup. it’s not about being the ideal setup, it was about realizing i could use my existing tools to do interesting things like play my favorite childhood Gameboy games whenever and wherever.

    you don’t even need a special case for it. i just use a pop socket to stand it up or hang it off something. again, something I already had.









  • my ex spent time in a woman’s prison in Georgia. she used to describe pretty much exactly this. among many other horrible things. it’s funny, in America there’s this common perception that the other prisoners are the scary part of prison. no, it’s the guards. they would find any excuse to beat people and rape was a nearly daily occurrence for some.

    the majority of her time served was before her trial or sentencing or anything. there is shockingly little difference between how we treat a person arrested, but still presumed innocent, and someone found guilty and in prison.


  • i guess i just assumed paleness 😅. I’ve never looked into it properly. just read a lot of stuff in that general setting. have had a lot of context clues to build a definition around.

    but yeah, it’s definitely more of a status thing. just like nails. I sometimes wish people were more aware of the history and cultural implications of the trend and fashions they follow. long nails are a status symbol because the show you don’t do manual labor. so i honestly get kind of annoyed when modern people with super long nails struggle to do their job because they’re unknowingly trying to flex that they don’t need that kind of job. but you can’t very well get that context all across when trying to train someone and they get mad that they can’t do a thing with their 3 inch nails. and you’d be a dickhead to try.

    i hate fashion most of the time because it’s like 99% all just about flexing wealth and status and creating a visual representation of hierarchy. the “experts” who follow it don’t know the historical context or where these styles come from or what they actually mean until the very tippy top where it stops making sense to anyone else. those people just look at it and embrace with open arms that fashion is their way of separating themselves from the poors. the more i learn about it the more it makes me sad about the human condition.

    for most cultures in most of history, sadly the common standard of beauty was largely defined by wealth. our lizard brains want a partner that can raise a child well. best advantage you can give a child is tons of money. always has been.