abraxas @ abraxas @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

It's a good point. If there were enough people they were blocking roads in every city on the same day, with thousands coming to cheer them on, it would be totally different then two people screaming obscenities on one highway in one city. The number of people you empower (or coerce I suppose) needs to outnumber the number of enemies you create.

Yeah, I'm with you on #3. A few random white people cementing themselves to 93N in Boston did ZERO to support BLM. Nobody was educated. People who were otherwise neutral on the topic got mad at BLM.

I think a little bit of "unnecessary" disruption is a good thing in protests so a group isn't easily ignored, but if your ONLY outcome is to make enemies and alienate allies, you did something wrong. Nobody even remembered that the 93N thing was for BLM unless they were already invested in BLM.

Malcolm X had one small thing wrong. It wasn't that "Silence is Violence" wasn't true, of course it's everyone's responsibility to fight injustice even if we're not minorities ourselves... It's that he said the quiet part loud. When you push people to take sides, often they take the *other side *because of your actions, when they wouldn't have dreamed of doing so otherwise.

I guess I'm not even living. Payless is more comfy than suit shoes, and more affordable.

I mean, I wouldn’t respect that either

I guess I'm trying to just differentiate two different worlds of behavior . Maybe it's not as big a deal as I make it, but I have a real problem with inconsistency and hypocrisy.

Bingo. If he kicked a kid out for locs and turned his son over to the authorities with a rousing "laws were broken, and I'm not asking for mercy" speech during sentencing, then he's just an authoritarian-loving jerk and you can respect that even if you won't grab a drink with him.

But this guy just likes to exert his white authority over black people. Not his innocent lilly-white drunk-driving son.

If you overpay taxes, the government is expected to return it. They return overpaid taxes all the time to hundreds of millions of Americans. It's really not that simple.

Additionally, someone calling for increased taxes on their class is not automatically morally expected to just contribute without the law changing. If anything, the govt being flush with cash is a great way of getting the focus off doing the right thing and actually taxing the wealthy more.

Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is "ripping off" or just a genre.

These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros... and about 2 dozen other games

Basically look at the AI generated cover, and you got Dresden Files. It's awesome and worth the read. A little rocky at first but it's the king of urban fantasy for a reason.

This image screams "Dresden Files" to me. About the only outlier is the girl. It seems a hybrid of Molly and Susan.

And the weird shark-jet, but my headcanon is that it's Sharkface, He Who Walks Before..

That happened to Comcast for a while. They milked it for a while, but it it led to them having a 10-year stock low. They're paying a price for being the most-hated company in America. Not the price they deserve, but it's not all sunshine and roses.

Ubisoft will have its day the same way, eventually. It won't be the day they deserve, but it'll still make them cry. And it'll be their own doing.

Most tenants are functionally judgement-proof, unless you only rent to upper-middle class people

This is fair on large damage numbers, but you can often squeeze someone making $40-50k/yr if they owe you $5-$10k in malice-caused damages... but more importantly, for that kind of damage, you're talking about small-claims court. You don't need a lawyer, just time, and "they poured concrete into the toilet - here's my bill" is the kind of open-and-shut case small-claims court thrives on.

As far as not being a slumlord, I have absolutely no tolerance for landlords that don’t want to keep properties in good repair, full stop

100% agree. But even super-renter-friendly states do little to hold landlords accountable. If you want to be a slumlord, you can be a successful slumlord. Tenant holds you to task with the state? You don't renew the lease. There's ways they can fuck with you if they know better, but often they don't. From someone I'm involved in a lawsuit with (can't give details), slumlording is a no-brainer as a numbers game. 100 slum apartments, get sued once a year, huge win.

Yeah, it’s expensive to replace a roof, but fuck you, that’s why you’re taking in rent.

Fuck yes. I'm not a huge fan of the whole "all landlords are evil" tankie rhetoric, but boy do I sympathize with them on the specific topic of slumlords.

I'm not questioning your motives directly. I'm suggesting that the changes you're looking for are still going to cause more harm than good to most people.

Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.

Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut? I'm not a capitalist, but I still firmly believe you need to show your work when you want to take action that hurts the lower 99% to "even the playing field".

As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.

You just wrongly accused me of not having af air discussion among equals, and then you pull this? The only thing you know about me is that someone in my extended family has made enough money in their life to buy two rental properties. They don't owe me anything. How does that make me privileged?

Further, you're accusing me of lacking empathy. Why? I have the same problem with preventing them from buying a house as you would have if I said we needed to kick EVERYONE out of their homes because somebody out there is homeless. It's the same thing to me. It's obviously not the same thing to you. Do I get to say you lack empathy because of it? Because I don't plan to. Instead, I like to engage as to why that's a bad idea.

Only if Apple doesn't find a way to make their payment functionality worth using. They have options. They can keep the rate competitive, make the payment functionality easier and more efficient, add a new "revenue-producing app" tier that charges a lot more if you produce revenue from means outside of their app.

They're definitely not powerless, but definitely will want to make adjustments to their process.

I don't think we can know for sure, but the typical reason SCOTUS refuses to hear an appeal is that they do not feel the case represents a significant question of law. As SCOTUS generally sees it, they're not about "swooping in to right injustice". They're about being the final arbiter of actual questions of law. If there are no actual questions of law worth addressing, there's no reason to take the case whether the verdict was just or unjust. There is more than one defensible outcome to a lot of trials, and SCOTUS is often not trying to "find the one right outcome".

I think the exception to that would be if appeals courts go rogue and rule in direct contradiction to established law. Well that, and if SCOTUS wants to go rogue and themselves rule in direct contradiction to established law (like Dobbs)

I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.

Your first comment did not include a "why". But you also don't seem to want to engage. Just throwing out a horrific idea on purpose to troll? I think I'm going to presume you're acting with self-awareness because I don't want to insult your intelligence.

So you do you. I'm out. Not like what you're suggesting will ever happen for people to lose sleep over it.

I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently

I don't think anyone has demonstrated that's true. If everyone but megacorporations stopped owning property other than the one they live in, I don't thin housing prices or rent would go down. In fact, it would have unexpected side-effects like increased rental rates (since you'd have to jump through even more hoops). Imagine if you will, the pre-flip car lease market. Owning cars was the way of the poor, leasing a new car every few years was the way of the rich. If only owner-occupied could be rentals, rent would skyrocket and the MANY people who want to rent would have to fight with each other. Consortiums would find a legal way to buy luxury rental buildings and have a dedicated "owner" live in them. As you implied, supply and demand. A lot of people don't want the liability of property ownership for reasons other than "being too poor to buy a house".

There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest

Yeah, it would collect more interest. So long as nothing happened to them (which it hasn't), they'd end up a lot richer. But it's a lot more risk because if something did happen to them, it would be harder for that money to be earmarked into a trust in the kids' name like the houses are. So they would have had to live with the real risk that their son would end up homeless, but yay they'd have a lot more money.

The problem with a lot of people suggesting real-estate reform is that they don't understand why individuals (not big businesses, that's different) buy rental houses. It's rarely about maximizing profit, it's about minimizing or mitigating risk.

To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.

Except, it sounds like you just said they would not be allowed to do what they did, and would be stuck with riskier propositions. Those houses were purchased under little LLCs so that if they got sued into bankruptcy their kids would still have a home (they themselves are under Homestead protections like most homeowners in my state). Not that they expected to be sued, but it's called "doing anything to make sure my kids don't end up on the street". That's what happens when you grow up in poverty. And there really is no better, simpler, and more reasonable way to make sure your kid won't be homeless than to buy them a house. And if you're not filthy rich, that doesn't mean buying it cash and handing it to them on a silver platter. (technically, I think that silver-platter method would still be allowed under the plan I'm objecting to because the kids would have an owner-occupied house in their name... yay rich people I guess. My family isn't rich enough for that)

It really is the Dems on this one.

I'm not sure you understand how Massachusetts politics works (or perhaps any local politics). I can't speak for the other states with in-depth knowledge, but boy can I school you about Massachusetts.

Federally, we're a deep-blue state, but that's just not all of how it works at the state level. With a few exceptions we usually have a Republican governor. Yeah, the rest of the US like to call them "RINO" because the're not on board with the craziest shit the alt-right has to offer. Most (if not all) of these changes happened under Romney and Baker, both Republican. Of note, none of these changes I'm talking about have ever shown up in a bill in legislature. They've all be driven by the executive action upon the mandate. That is, they fall on the governor. Who was Republican.

...and yet, I didn't say it's The Republicans, either. Democrats could've stepped in by passing laws preventing that behavior. We didn't because our Democrats like to keep peace with our Republicans and, frankly, because the Democrats don't care enough to involve themselves in the HOW as long as subsidies are happening.

But Dems aren’t following through with what they say they want to do–affordable housing for all

Again, I can only speak for MA. With one very recent exception (and excepting the recent excessive price spikes), MA does fairly well with providing affordable housing for all as long as it's outside of Boston. But I think I wasn't being entirely clear. I am mostly talking about Housing Project availability. Section 8 is, as you suggested, up to the landlord. It's worded to allow people to live basically anywhere, even in the heart of Boston, with a limited income.

BTW - section 8 should be great for a landlord. You are guaranteed payment on the 1st of every month, and you can still initiate eviction if the tenant is trashing your property or doing crime

From family experience, the issue is that "trashing your property" can cost you years of profits or even force you to sell the building. I've had family deal with the notorious "cement in the toilet" meme for real. People really do it and it really costs a massive amount of money to handle. Home and landlord insurance does not cover intentional damage by tenants. We're talking up to $15,000 damage just because they're mad you're evicting them.

Most landlords don't care about "not wanting poor people" with Section 8. They care about having judgement-proof tenants who can cause damage and never be held accountable due to being poor. They also have to meet certain building code and quality standards that non-section-8 landlords don't! There's a LOT of non-section-8 rentals in New Bedford for this reason. No, they're not trying to gentrify Durfee Street, I promise you that!

There's two sides to the section 8 coin. Side 1 is that the rent is slightly above-average and some of it always shows up on time. Side 2 is that the rest of it is often late, overall risk is higher, and then you actually can't be a slumlord. I mean, look at the list of rules. Everyone I know living in New Bedford apartments have (checks list) shitty or broken HVAC, decaying building foundation, crappy interior stairs, pest issues, flaking paint, etc. Not only can landlords get away with a lot of that (and worse) normally, but Section 8 includes annual and spot inspections for all of them.

I don't fault the state making these demands, but it leads to a lot of people not registering their rental with Section 8, for reasons that have nothing to do with Poor tenants (and in many cases BECAUSE they're going to have poor tenants who won't pitch a fit about a not-to-code apartment). I've rented from places that would have failed Section 8. And I kept my mouth shut.

It's ok. It's so common that companies teach classes on interpreting (or not over-interpreting) emotion into email. It's one of multiple reasons people often get into heated arguments on the interrnet when they would not in person.

I'm not angry right now. I'm just telling it like it is to me.

Please be careful not to think you read emotions into comments when they might not be there.

The problem is the lack of business-reason to spend money on things that do not raise the property value. Unfortunately "fixing things" usually carries a negative value return.

The common things flippers do (and I know this from some friends who did real-estate for flippers) is buy houses that mostly need the most efficient changes - new tile, paint, etc, with minimal inexpensive fixes to make the house saleable. And honestly, that's obvious when you say it. The extension of that is that if you can cover up an issue or the issue is not outside margins of being saleable (old septic, safe-but-near-EOL electrical, less ideal insulation, intentionally avoiding discovering asbestos where it probably exists, etc), you should.

Then, depending on local laws, flippers have more limited disclosure requirements than builders. Which means anything that isn't "gross negligence" that cannot show up on a home inspection... you. just. don't. do.

Here's an interesting article on the risk.