How did it take them 9 years to feel duped?

These idiots live in sewer-like information ecosystems.

You can’t even go out to a brewery in my area without a bunch of unparented kiddos running around your feet.

Some of them even have their fucking birthdays at the brewery. Happy 8th, Stetson! Your first present this year is watching Mommy and Daddy get hammered and have public arguments.

As one of my former coworkers said to me a long time ago: he’s the big orange swamp monster.

Because they’re owned, and they’re pussies

Psssst you shouldn’t be encouraging others to use your shitty Internet provider. It’ll only make it slower for you.

Problem is that we’ve all been taught for forty years that every problem is an individual problem, actually, and that nobody needs solidarity.

We’ve digested all the communal systems in this country and now instead of “we the people” it’s all about “me the person”.

And now we’re arriving at near literal national socialism.

I ain’t reading all of that, especially not when the first thing you did in this reply is take a phrase out of a sentence and tried to pretend that was the entire thought when it clearly wasn’t.

How are you going to get grocery prices down? Through georgism and ubi? Lord knows we cannot tax rich people who have all of the money nor look at any systemic factors because we’re 🙈🙉🙊 when it comes to them.

You’re just a crank. Go crank it on someone else’s finite time.

It is literally impossible for us to both preserve grandma and grandpa’s current home value AND have affordable housing at the same time.

It literally isn’t. You rezone areas for multifamily units, you build newer, denser structures in populated areas, you setup public transit so that commute distances can allow for more sprawl, etc etc etc. I’m also not talking about preserving their home value either. I’m talking about allowing them to continue to live there rather than taxing them into the old folks home.

You just want to self-flaggelate because you’re an owner occupant, and this exchange is extremely boring and not even very related to the original topic. You just like to argue and be contrarian, and looking at your name again I feel like we’ve already done this before and this is just the line of bullshit you always want to pull out regardless of actual topic.

Edit: I mean what in the name of fuck does any of this have to do with grocery prices?

I also didn’t say eliminate private ownership of real estate. People own cars and they depreciate.

Cars naturally depreciate for multiple reasons but it’s largely because the cost of maintenance for old cars goes up as the parts wear down. In addition, cars are dealt in the US by a form of cartel that artificially inflates the price of new cars.

Land remains land, and to a large extent, a well-built house is still a well-built house. That is why it appreciates in value.

It could be solved as simply as a 100% capital gains tax on land value (not property value, because that includes buildings) or introduce a land value tax value so high that you can pay for a universal basic income, making it impossible to profit from simply owning land.

Capital gains aren’t realized until a property is sold. That’s not “simply owning land”. It’s fucking selling it. Land value taxes sound meh, fine, to me as an idea. But having them so high that you can “pay for a universal basic income” is fully ridiculous. You’re talking about taxing grandma and grandpa out of their house and probably destroying their net worth, but somehow always find a way to shed a tear for poor blackrock and their investors who “only” own 60-70k houses.

https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/investors-majority-homes-some-calif-counties-20780941.php

It ain’t just blackrock, buddy oh pal, there are plenty of corporate real estate investors and there would be plenty more than 60-70k houses to seize from them.

Separately, owner occupants are not a major contributor to the housing crisis, and taxing them will not net the government anywhere near the funds needed to have a UBI.

You can go buy into their products right now starting at around $100 for ETFs if you want, and there’s plenty of non-rich people who are part of that $11 billion that they manage.

Who cares? So some people have their share price drop a bit for retirement savings or something enabling many others to live a much better life. Any restructuring of the economy is going to make some people unhappy.

Suggesting you can just go take all their real estate holdings is the same as saying you’re going to go take the money of grandma and grandpa

Nope, it’s saying I’m going to take assets from an asset holding company and give them to people that can actually use the assets. But nice try at misdirection.

The housing crisis is NOT being caused by corporations buying up houses.

Didn’t say it was, but it certainly is exacerbated by them.

The housing crisis is being caused by the fact that our system allows ANYONE to invest in houses at all.

LOL, alright. So we cannot take Blackrock’s real estate holdings in even a hypothetical situation and redistribute them, but there would be no problem just completely obliterating the concept of private ownership of real estate? I guess no grandma or grandpa has a reverse mortgage they’re using, or we went from giving a shit about their hypothetical, minor stakeholdings in a hedge fund being affected in one paragraph to completely forgetting they exist at all in the next.

Are you a random argument generator or something?

So now because I debunked your bad math, we’re going from “it’s not enough money to make a difference” to “it’s not liquid”.

I agree, it isn’t all liquid, and you can’t eat stock shares. But I’m sure you could do an awful lot to solve the “housing crisis” if you took over all of Blackrock’s real estate holdings and handed them out to people that were looking to live their lives in a house instead of trying to squeeze money out of a crisis for their own profit.

That’s just a first, easy example of good that could come out of a hypothetical redistribution of resources. There are countless others.

That’s dividing by every woman, man, and child. It almost certainly wouldn’t be done that way. You absolutely wouldn’t give children $60,000 checks. And why are you comparing your $60k number to household incomes (which are pooled values)?

Even if it were done this way nominally, you’d have a household with two parents and two kids receiving $240k in a one-off payment, and then presumably you’d correct the tax structure so as to not wind up with the same equality gap so they’d pay less in taxes.

I don’t know what you think the average US household looks like, but nearly a quarter million dollar direct cash infusion would change a hell of a lot about most people’s lives.

EDIT: I think if we weren’t talking in complete hypotheticals here too, you’d do it by taxing the rich rather than eating them and directly redistributing their money. Even $10 trillion would be enough to fund a lot of government programs that could get to work fixing things for the people.

I have a Honda Fit and it is the best car I’ve ever owned. If Honda came up with a Fit EV (again), I would probably buy it right away.

I really wish Clinton would have been forced to resign in 1996.

Politicians should be disposable when they are found to be terrible people that committed bad acts. Whenever we find serious dirt on them they should be drummed out of fucking town. In contrast to, you know, the current thing which is to elect a fucking convicted felon and admitted sexual predator president because he’s some kind of special politician we have to allow to continue to be a completely unaccountable filthy fucking shit pig for some reason.

Have you considered the way they portray anything right of GWB?

Yeah, like the loggers clearing out the jungle. They portray them as heroes. Or the one where the tobacco companies are portrayed as heroes.

It’s not out and out libertarian propaganda because I think there’s a lot more emphasis on the jokes. But it’s pretty fucking close.

No shit they are both sides. Everyone is fair game for them, no ones safe from satire or mocking. It’s the whole point of the show.

They pick who to mock and how thoroughly. I haven’t watched the show in probably a decade, but up until this they were using Mr Garrison to portray “Trump”.

Theoretically, nobody’s safe, but in practice anything left of GWB is portrayed as a whiny baby, a stupid hippy, or whatever.

At least they seem to realize that “left wokeism” isn’t the top threat in the country anymore, even if they were suckers for buying that it was in the first place.

Edit: I don’t know what to tell you guys, they even have characters in this episode that are like “just because wokeism went too far in one direction doesn’t mean we should go too far in the other”. They really do seem to believe that because liberals are annoying to them that they’re just as bad as concentration camp Trump.

They also vote on work requirements for things like health care benefits and then clock a zero hour day at their own fucking jobs.

Congress should have to work a standard forty hour work week to receive benefits and make time off requests like the rest of us.

Someone should write a book like this but have it feature all of these stupid fucking politicians. Have Trump go to town on Lindsey Graham, Epstein, and John Kennedy in it.

I often think about how many people I went to school with felt that high school was difficult. High school in America is a fucking joke. I understand that high school is difficult if you have a disability of some sort, and I even buy the cultural bias argument for standardized testing, but I went to high school in a lilly white suburb with lots of supposedly normative kids and some of them barely made it through graduation.

The American populace is chock full of idiots. Most of the people that even graduated high school here (which is not everyone) went on to never pick up another book again.