WW3 started two years ago

It’s not a proxy war between Russia and the US. It’s a proxy war between China and the US.

Russia and Ukraine are the pawns

I’m not an expert either and I could have predicted the invasion based on:

• huge buildup of troops in preparation for invasion
• 8 years prior they had invaded after saying they wouldn’t

So basically, any time a company lets people go that’s stealing, and you want there to be a court thing that judges whether any particular loss was due to mismanagement or “genuine misfortune”?

That seems like a pretty extreme response to high delivery fees don’t you think?

Making money by facilitating deals and delivery. Sounds to me like everybody wins.

They need access to a better place. I suppose they just get financially stuck in S Korea? Or do the move on to other countries too, more willing to give them a chance?

Every picture of Putin and Kim together just looks like an adult tricking a kid.

poly fill indeed

Yup, racism. Right out in the open. Upvoted, even.

No, the issue is artificial friction added to the new construction process which keeps overall supply lower than demand, and pushes prices up continuously.

It’s good to have building codes, because we need safe buildings. But we should offset their existence by slightly subsidizing new construction. Basically we want to enable as closely as possible the natural balancing between supply and demand. Right now, the heavy regulation (both legitimate and overreach) of new construction, as well as the high paperwork and hassle cost, and the uncertainty of permitting or of permitting timeline, all those things are a big finger on the scale pushing supply down.

Maintaining a constant downward adjustment on the amount of new housing constructed each year is a recipe for exactly this situation we have now: disrespect of tenants by landlords, and exploding rent prices.

We don’t have a free market in housing. We have a tightly controlled market where new supply is constantly gatekept and thereby suppressed.

I mentioned building codes but there’s also nimbyist zoning laws. There are plenty of places where a 100-unit apartment building would be a more profitable use of space, but zoning prevents the construction of more than 10 single family homes.

We do this for lots of reasons, such as maintaining the architectural character of the town, protecting rich people’s views by prevnring tall buildings, avoiding health issues, managing transportation demand, etc etc.

But we need to be conscious of the fact that the price we pay for all those other benefits, is that we have a housing shortage.

Well yeah. You do realize there are many, many levels of wealth right?

Orwell explains it well in 1984. The upper class only comes down when the middle and the lower team up.

If you’re upper class and want to prevent a revolution that takes you off the top level of society, the way to do that is to sew division between the lower and middle classes.

In a typical landlord/renter scenario, the landlord is middle class and the renter is low class.

That person is like an inch above you, and there are other people who are miles above that.

Right. Because murder is a heinous crime that rips a person’s life away.

Renting out apartments isn’t in the same category as murder.

That’s the thing man. There are enough billionaires that they have a society. Being a billionaire no longer means unilaterally changing the world, because other billionaires won’t cooperate if you’re going against their wishes.

So billionaires are no longer “above” society. They just live in a new stratum of society, but they still have to deal with the existence of their peers.

Just read bro. You responded to something other than what I said.

As a libertarian I try to make it clear that free markets can’t exist in the modern world without government activity.

In the prehistoric world, a person with something to sell or trade could mostly do so without interference, because everyone had similar physical power, making robbery more dangerous than it was worth.

But once power structures started accumulating: armies, governments, powerful families, etc, the only way to maintain free trade is via government actively maintaining that secure market space.

So the natural deterrent of coercive economic interaction (get injured when target defends their stuff), got replaced with the artificial deterrent of law enforcement (go to jail when target reports your theft).

Free markets need to be level and fair, and it takes government firepower to counter all the other firepower and level the negotiations out. When people can negotiate without fear of violence reprisal, they can freely enter or not enter whatever set of economic arrangements are best for them.

Free markets mean people can enter the market and do whatever kind of business they please so long as someone else is willing to take that deal. You can’t do that without a large effort to keep the space clear of criminal coercion.

We need to find an argument, which is convincing to billionaires, that the world will be better for them if they and all other billionaires pay their full share of taxes.

Government can be a win for the individual, if all the other individuals are also making the same sacrifice.

So like if Joe gets taxed some of his money and he’s the only one, then Joe loses because Joe’s money can’t serve him any better being spent by someone else.

But if Joe gets taxed some of his money and so does everyone else who Joe lives with, then Joe can win by this because the effect of the commonwealth generated can benefit him more than the money would have in his own account.

Like, I’m happy to pay taxes in order to live in a society of laws and security and free open markets where I can trade with people to get things I can’t provide myself.

By giving up that 10% of my money, I’m gaining all this other wealth in the form of a stable society.

So we need to articulate how the global benefits of those billionaires’ tax money being pooled and spent on commonwealth, is better even for the billionaires than if they’d each individually kept that money.

Am I being clear here? I feel like I’m not.

Like if we went after Elon Musk and only Elon Musk for back taxes, then Elon Musk loses.

But if we go after all the billionaires for their back taxes, then the billionaires can win too, by benefitting from the overall societal improvements.

And so long as the other billionaires are also taking financial hits, any given billionaire isn’t slipping in their billionaire-vs-billionaire game of status. They’re all losing money equally across the board.

The reason to go looking for an argument that takes the billionaires’ benefits into account, is that billionaires are the only ones who can make this tax thing happen. Their influence is too great to do it against their will.

As an attentive English student, I must disagree.

Gotta use these things up guys

Ope gonna give it to ya

People have the right to do as they please, even if it means choosing a path toward their own demise.

People aren’t unaware of climate change. Everyone knows about it. What you’re seeing is a manifestation of the average human’s ranking of climate change in their own list of things to be concerned about.

You have no right to tell someone that climate change is more important than the things they choose to focus on instead.

If you think they’re mistaken about what’s on the table, like they underestimate the danger or something like that, then the right move is to inform them. All this protest activity is implicitly based on the assumption people just sort of … forgot about climate change.

They didn’t. They just don’t prioritize it over the other problems in their lives. Which is their right.