Biden Announces Plan to Cancel Some Student Loan Balances Under $12,000
BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 1,142Joined 2 yr. ago
BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social
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Have you ever seen an election year?
Revealing the bigotry is basically the point. Trump talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country and it made him more popular.
Not all homes are for sale every year. The vast majority are not.
If Wall Street buys 30% of all homes for sale this year, that does not mean that they now own 30% of all homes that exist, only 30% of those that happened to go on sale this year.
To answer the proximate question, about 70% of rental properties are owned by individuals.
Yes. Politics nowadays is less about winning the argument and more about actually getting your supporters to show up.
This is ludicrously false.
The statistic you're trying to say is that about 25% of homes sold in recent months have been bought by investors, which is a very different thing from saying that nearly one-fourth of all single family homes are owned by investors, which falls apart the moment you actually go outside and talk to people, since, for starters, about 65% of Americans own their home.
The homeownership rate of 66.0 percent was virtually the same as the rate in the third quarter 2022 (66.0 percent) and not statistically different from the rate in the second quarter 2023 (65.9 percent).
Always happy to leave an impression!
They still have to be driven by basic math. You slim the margins a bit by not needing to generate profit, but the situation hasn't fundamentally changed.
You're absolutely right. This is a problem that requires some amount of direct government assistance. Beachfront housing is significantly more costly than people think it is and than it used to be, and it's only going to get worse. If you can't afford regular repairs after storms (or if a collectively relevant insurance pool can't), you can't afford to live there, and for people who are already there and can't afford to easily get out, some government assistance is more than warranted.
I'm not talking about raw safety. I'm referring to the situation where the average costs a resident of the area will incur due to environmental damage surpasses the amount an average person is willing to pay in insurance premiums. In these kinds of areas, insurance in inherently unworkable, regardless of profit seeking or not (again, minus a minor adjustment in margins)
In these places, you can either add in external subsidies to make the numbers work, which is bound to be unpopular with the people having to pay extra money to support people choosing to incur unnecessary costs, or you can accept that there is no workable insurance scheme in the area that and residents must take account of their own risks. There's no real way around this basic reality.
Well, it's a mixed bag. There have been absolutely incredible advances in efficiency that do enable a lot of things to genuinely be much cheaper and accessible than they used to be, but some of that is also just the ability to throw external costs on other people (climate change, for instance). This is why things like carbon taxes are so strongly supported by economists.
Steak, for instance, is hugely subsidized by how little farmers have to pay for water, along with other government benefits. Flying has environmental costs, but those are reasonably quantifiable and, per flight and per passenger, not that insane as far as I understand.
I do think consumer electronics are a bit of a different story though. Yes, cheap labor plays a huge role there, but those labor costs aren't completely divorced from reality; the fact of the matter is that east Asian labor is actually chap. Ocean shipping and modern production plants are insanely efficient, though again climate costs need to be captured.
I mean, there's no mystery here. You can literally just look at the regions that home insurers have been pulling out of to get a pretty good start. This data already exists. Collecting and processing that data is literally the primary thing that insurance companies do.
If a company whose sole purpose is extracting every bit of profit they can is deciding that insuring an area is not feasible, that probably says something. The inevitable, but obviously unpopular, answer is that there are some places where people moving there need to do so at their own risk, because it's not fair for them to throw these fundamentally unnecessary high costs on other people. Minus a small adjustment to account for how state insurance doesn't need profit and so can operate at zero margin, the structure of the insurance doesn't really make a difference here.
And, who, pray tell, is this mythical successor that would do better?
Give me a name, please. It's so easy to say "young Democrat that everyone likes" should run instead of Biden. But what actual person is that?
This doesn't address the core issue, that the math simply doesn't work in several places. Even ignoring profit, at the very least, you have to balance your payouts with your premium revenue, and if your payouts are so high that premiums must be higher than what people can afford, then you're toast.
Or you invoke government subsidies, in which case it's essentially a tax to subsidize people's poor decision making. At the end of the day, living in an area extremely prone to fires or flooding has real costs, and either somebody pays them, whether that be the individual, an insurance pool, or the government, or you simply stop incurring the cost by moving somewhere else (there's a strong argument for some amount of government assistance here)
If we'd always been accounting for all the actual costs of cars, including externalities, most people would have never been able to afford them, we'd recognize them as the very costly luxeries they actually are, and not have completely dismantled our ability to live without them in every city except NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and San Francisco.
I'm speaking solely to the facts on the ground.
Regardless of anyone's thoughts on the matter, Israel does hold all the guns here. Rights and privileges mean as much as the paper they're printed on. In a perfect world, Israel and Palestine would exist side by side as peaceful partners, each with fully fledged institutions and militaries and all that jazz. But unless Israel is confident that a Palestinian military won't have its destruction as its primary goal, it will not allow that to happen, no matter how much pontificating about rights and narratives and double standards anyone does. I'm not trying to talk about who's "right", whatever that even means. I'm talking about the actual situation and what will actually happen, regardless of anyone's opinions on the matter.
When a country has such a consistent history, it’s rational to believe that they will continue annexing Palestinian lands
And an Israeli would say that Palestinians have a consistent history of attempting to murder Israeli civilians and so it is rational to never allow them to build up any military power, and thus the circus goes round. My point is that no amount of moral superiority means very much if you don't have actual power to go along with it, and Palestinians simply do not. If the goal is actually to develop a real peace rather than avenge any sins of the past, both sides will have to give up on prior grievances and decide that they care more about the lives of their children than their own pride. It's hard to imagine the situation being much worse than it already is (though I'm sure it'll find a way)
it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.
This has literally already happened. Israel beat them all in six days.
Perfectly harmless is overstating the case. It is undoubtedly much less harmful than alcohol, but there are still some detrimental effects.
Of course, there are also significant, much more so, detrimental effects to soda and to sitting down. There's a level of risk for which society has solidly decided that the choice is up to the individual, and marijuana undoubtedly should be in that category, but we shouldn't pretend that there are literally zero negative effects.
You're gonna have a hard time defining "drug" in a way that all people agree with.
Presumably you don't mean prescription medications, though of course many of them are abused. Does caffeine count? Coffee is linked to many measurable health benefits. What about alcohol? No health benefit and a clear risk of abuse, but there's also thousands of years of social history, and I think plenty of people would say that, at least sometimes, the benefits of a great night out with friends or meeting new people and developing new relationships is more than worth the cost.
Then you have things like hallucinogens, which generally have only minor health concerns and were mostly criminalized for political reasons. Marijuana is literally a plant, and while the health profile is mixed, at least for some people, it's without a doubt a net positive. In comparison, and especially relevant to Mexico, there's heroin, which is incredibly addictive and dangerous while also funneling tons of money into the cartels.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, but more to make the case that any kind of policy or position on "drugs" as a whole is way too widely scoped. There are too many different substances with drastically different social and medical costs and benefits. Probably no one should ever consume heroin or meth. People with a risk of schizophrenia should absolutely not touch LSD, but people with PTSD may genuinely benefit from MDMA. Alcoholics should never touch alcohol, but your average person having a few drinks on a Friday night out with some friends probably isn't making a bad decision.
For sure, I'm not at all trying to portray Israel as blameless here, because they are not.
I think the blockade does have some basic level of merit, at least in principle (it can't really be doubted that Hamas does import weapons and materials with Iranian backing), but it's critical that those kinds of controls only go as far as they're needed and no further. However, the Israeli government has never really cared about not going to far, so Palestinians have no real reason to trust that they're being treated in good faith, violence comes to feel like the only real option, and onwards the mess rolls along.
Along with Palestinians needing to accept that Israel is going to exist in some capacity and that it will not accept any deal that doesn't ensure its security, Israelis need to accept that if they don't take every step towards keeping peaceful paths available and fruitful, then people will turn to violent ones. Israel can of course easily win a conflict of violence, but it doesn't have to be this way
Maybe if it was the 1940s this would be a bit more accurate, but at this point, we're a couple generations removed from the original mass displacements. Most Israelis today were born there.
Like I said, the way towards progress lies with both sides finding a way to get over historical grievances of who started what and who's to blame for this and that and instead accepting the fact that they're both here now and need to find a way to exist with each other.
Not to mention, there's no faster way to cause another inflation crisis than printing a bunch of money and giving it to the demographic that's statistically the highest earners.