MonkRome @ MonkRome @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I knew this guy years ago that bought up basically free property during the housing crisis. Houses were so undesirable in Detroit at the peak of the housing crisis, you could buy a house for $100, as they were considered a liability. His goal was to fix them up himself and then provide them to the community as extremely low rent residences, if anyone wanted to buy them after they were fixed up he would give priority to his renters at slightly above cost (cost of materials) as a rent to own system (not one of the scummy ones but a real system in their favor). He had no intention of making money, he just believed it was the right thing to do. Dude was just a good person through and through.

even comming from their government that knownly financed dictatorships and even invades countries in the name of anti-communism.

Bring out the whataboutism. I've never understood the need for communists to stan for horrible countries anymore than I understand the need for moderates or right wingers to stan for the USA. The USA and China both have horrendous governments, their mode of governments are kind of irrelevant to the fact that they practice massive disinformation, genocide, war, colonialism, ethnocentrism, and concentrate tremendous power at the top. A government loosely tying itself to left wing policy, in name only, doesn't automatically make it good.

Ted Cruz absolutely is a lying bigoted piece of shit. But racism and antisemitism absolutely comes from both sides of the aisle in large quantity. If you were to say it's more accepted on the right I'd agree, but bigotry of all types is plenty rampant on the left.

Edit: love the downvotes, but I am a leftwing jew. Nearly 100% of the antisemitism I have experienced first hand in my life has come from the left. Most of the racism my wife, who is not white, has come from the left. If you honestly think the left doesn't also have a serious problem with bigotry you are all fucking blind. Actually ask people who actually experience these things where it's coming from and you will get a more nuanced answer than "right wing racist, leftwing good"...

Woopi Goldberg specializes in saying ignorant shit to try and stay relevant. She's just a shock jock. Stop falling for it.

Also remove the restrictions on multi use zoning. Housing scarcity is entirely artificial in most locations. If the pressure valve was released prices would stabilize.

Which is exactly why misinformation peddlers are so dangerous. Human beings rely on other people for knowledge and most people only provide the information that benefits them while leaving out the information that doesn't, or worse, they lie. I think humans greatest problem to overcome is our propensity to be largely misinformed on most of the topics that develop our beliefs.

You're tying a group that's not a monolith with another group that's not a monolith and making a number of assumptions in both cases. Not only are a lot of rural people left wing and not at all racist. But I've yet to meet a single rural person that married their cousin, but I have met a city person that has.

Alternatively, the other week I was riding a taxi with this black guy who was as left wing as they come, had very progressive ideas, and was Trump's biggest fan, he was absolutely obsessed with Trump. He thinks there is some big conspiracy that makes all other politicians evil and Trump is going to save us.

When you make basic generalizations about groups of people you increase divisiveness and make the problem worse. Rural people know city liberals look down on them, and that pushes the divide further and further. I grew up in a heavily liberal rural area that is becoming more and more right wing, and people exactly like you are responsible. People like you made that happen. Be better.

Tell me you've never lived in a rural area without telling me you never lived in a rural area. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly confused and usually revolted by trump supporters, but the rampant intolerance of rural people is also revolting.

The vast majority of what we already teach in society is about white men. Someone offers stories that are about something other than white men because they see that women are under represented in teaching, not because they believe that only successful women should be included in teaching. You're intentionally obfuscating the point...

When I was traveling in South Korea they had these at some counter service and fast food restaurants. Since often people didn't speak English and I don't speak Korean they were immensely helpful. They had several languages and settings that made ordering so much easier. From an accessibility standpoint they are awesome.

Both of which appear to also be dropping in severity with time. If you were to say, people should still be careful and wear masks in a crowd, and generally take covid seriously because it's still dangerous, I completely agree with you. But at some point continuing to call something a pandemic is abusing the word a little, once it's being fully managed and generally under control then it's no longer a pandemic. Our own policy places us somewhere between a pandemic and an endemic, so I suppose it really depends on your definitions of the words and how squishy our perceptions of those words really are.

While I haven't look at recent data, my understanding is that new covid strains are, on average, getting less deadly and but more contagious as time moves forward. If that is still the case, then what we are really looking at now is an manageable endemic virus instead of a pandemic emergency, it's becoming more and more like the flu. It's important to remember that the flu was originally a pandemic that killed millions world wide and then became manageable and endemic. The prevailing scientific belief is that most viruses will slowly become more contagious and less deadly over time as those are the mutations most likely to survive. As the death rates continue to drop over time it's hard to really call it a pandemic anymore.

And what happens in the unlikely event of system collapse? If some major cataclysmic event wiped out the world economy and half the worlds population, what happens when suddenly thousands of nuclear plants are abandoned and melt down world wide? Nuclear is safer in a vacuum, but we don't exist in a vacuum. Anything that can happen, will eventually happen. Even if those power plants are able to be shut down safely, in a post stable world, the storage of the spent waste would be incredibly problematic as we would no longer have the capacity or knowledge to bury it 4 miles down. I would say that nuclear power is far more risky long term than people give it credit for. We are evaluating it's risk only based on the present stability and regulations of our current systems. Modern technological stability is really a tiny blip in earths history, we really can't guarantee a future that will know what to do with spent nuclear waste. Nuclear power is really an all-in bet on our own technological dominance of the future.

I say this as someone that is not against nuclear power, but I think people view it as some sort of quick fix when it just presents it's own problems. The truth is, you don't get something for nothing. All energy costs something and that cost should be distributed between several systems and our consumption should be reduced.

Yeah I usually mix mine with carbonated water, they are too sweet anyway. Once mixed, they are likely less than 1/4th of the sugar of a coca cola and I only have 1 a day if I even have one. I think at that point the health impact is negligible.

So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn’t protect itself.

I mostly agree, but 'taken' is somewhat reductive, it was more like a forced partition. Jews already lived there and were already emigrating there en masse long before the end of WWII, Zionism ramped up in the late 1800's, 60 years before the Jewish state. There was already violence in that area through a lot of early Zionism and a civil war in the few years leading up to partition.

It would be like if the UK decided tomorrow to give 35% of the US to Hispanic Americans despite them only being ~20% of the population, it just a weird way to split up a country that is bound to cause conflict. (Jews were 30% of the population of Israel/Palestine when it was split in half) No one actually expected Israel to survive the wars at the start, as you said they just wanted to push the 'problem' onto someone else. If you're a displaced population what do you do if no one wants to take you and your under threat of death most places you go? It's important to remember that Jews were pretty much universally hated everywhere in the world prior to WWII, they didn't have many prospects for peace.

I suspect however that if partition never happened, there would still be ethnic conflict in that area and it would have just shifted who was the oppressed group. Which really highlights the real problem as you implied, the inability for many religious communities to live side by side. Look at India, Nigeria, Ireland, etc. Whenever you have 2 prominent religions in large enough numbers living closely together their fanaticism often doesn't allow a shared sense of national unity. Banning religion is a great way to make religion popular again though, not the best way to get rid of it. A secular education is the best way to get rid of religion.

Some people want a flavored drink. If it's between fruit juice and soda though, juice is healthier and imo tastes better as well. Blackberry Izze is the best.

I've known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can't drink it. There's probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.

I was responding to you saying "there's no such thing as a good religious person". I don't really disagree with the rest of your perspective, yet your arguing as if you assume I do. I think it's reductive and crass to judge someone on a single data point. That was my primary point.

I think you're reading more into my comment than I said. To be clear, I'm not a fan of religion and do believe science is the route to knowledge. But it took an entire generation of scientists dying out to have washing hands normalized. Our society places faith and belief in science in a way that still mirrors religion even if it is more flexible.

I was going to link the same wiki to argue the opposite. Twice as much as tiny is still small. What that wiki article shows to me is that tobacco use is way way down, the 12th country on that list only has double the tobacco use of the US. Considering 60 years ago about half of adults smoked in the westernized world it's way down and it's been on a constant decline. Several European countries are only marginally higher than the US and ~4 are lower.

Though I must admit, looking at more data, it's still higher than I would have guessed, about 12% in the USA when I would have guessed 5%. I live in a city.