zifnab25

joined 5 years ago
[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 5 points 2 years ago

Wouldn't be the first time socialists took over a northwestern state democratic party.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 7 points 2 years ago

Going to the B-roll footage of Apocalypse Now to deny the existence of Vietnam

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Reminds me of the first season of Macross, where they try to turn on the anti-gravity boosters and simply... blast them into space by mistake. Then later, when they realize the ship can transform, but moving the decks ends up wrecking the human-modified interior.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 24 points 2 years ago

She can just vote present or skip the vote entirely. Its the traditional move for Congresscritters that want to vote "No" without having an official "No"-vote on their record.

But its hardly a "trap" in the meaningful sense. Not like Talib isn't a known quantity in her district. This is just House Leadership pretending like they're doing their jobs, while the country sinks into the morass of economic doldrums and social strife. If anything, incumbents being too vocal in their dogged support of Israel are setting themselves up for outsider opponents who want to capitalize on the anti-Israeli sentiment that's been building for weeks.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There will always be people who need transient housing for legitimate reasons;

Sure. But, like, we used to have this idea of dorms in schools where they were an amenity of the school. Similarly, the businesses that need temporarily labor are - functionally - on the hook for the cost of their housing already. Short term housing isn't a problem unknown to planned economies. Some of the nicest hotels in the world were in the USSR.

I would prefer to see some family get help staying in their own home than see some corporate landlord vacuum more wealth out of communities.

Oh sure, if we're talking lesser evils. The woman letting her spare room to cover the mortgage pales beside the industrialized slum. But these are both facets of the same structural problem. Artificially constrained and cartelized real estate creates the condition for high market prices. The elderly fixed-income land lady can stake her very tiny claim or withhold it without meaningfully impacting the overall system. She is simply profiting off the cheaply developed real estate of the prior generation, while her college-aged tenant is paying a generational tax for arriving too late to the party.

That being said the whole system of for profit housing needs to be burned down and replaced with housing allocation based on planning and need.

The trick is in striding through that middle period where landladies are held up as the iconic victims of a ruthless Stalin-esque repatriation of private real estate.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A mid-tier serial drama by Dean Devlin

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Where are all these small landlords?!

They still exist here and there. Generally speaking, they're cheaper than the big corporate brands but also significantly less responsive because its one guy and his two sons pretending they can handyman their way through a forty unit complex that hasn't had a proper renovation since the 1980s. Because they don't have the state-of-the-art fuck-you-rent-goes-up optimization computers, they get a lot of lower income and longer term tenants. But they're also prime for buy-outs from folks with infinity borrowed-at-0% financing.

So what you'll often see is a large community of people who hate their old small landlord because they have to maintain properties they don't own double-plus hate their new big landlord even harder for jacking up rent to force them out and bulldoze the space.

she was just renting out her basement not hording housing.

Its frustrating, because a lot of this isn't an individualist "hording housing" problem nearly so much as it is an institutional "we only have ranch style housing that sells for $1000/sqft" problem. So while renting your basement is far from the worst landlordism imaginable, it is still functionally profiting from a shortage of housing that your home functionally represents.

Its not her fault. She's just in a position to glean rents off a problem she has no control over, while you are not.

The real problem is for-profit real estate development. Ranch housing is cheap to develop and flip when populations are low-but-growing, while big MFUs cost more up front and clear more slowly. But then ranch home prices inflate as MFUs come into higher demand, and you have an incentive to rent-seek and speculate rather than make way for denser development, because why would you not?

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 21 points 2 years ago
[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's way too nice to be a dive bar.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 17 points 2 years ago

maybe-later-honey warren-snake-green chomsky-yes-honey So that's why you need to vote for Joe Biden.

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Brazil has historically treated Guyana as a satrap of its own regional control. And there's a very real possibility that the Brazilian military dictates the terms to Lula, as they've already had their share of coups. So its more an Exxon-affiliated military commander working on behalf of Western economic interests to undercut Maduro's influence in their zone.

I also really don't think Venezuelans are interested in open war with a much larger and richer neighbor, for precisely the same reasons a lot of Ukrainians had no interest in fucking with Russia. Setting aside the ideological politics of the area, this would be a bloodbath for all involved and would undercut any hope of a unified Latin America. The divide-and-conquer imperialist strategy is the biggest weapon westerners have on their side when dealing with the Global South.

A single, unified South America would operate as a counterweight on par with the US, China, and Russia. These border wars are essential in keeping that future from happening.

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