Onihikage

Putin: “I don’t see what’s so hard to understand. All you have to do for the fighting to stop is to give me everything I want.”

What a clown.

Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting.

I really would like nothing more than to get some tasty, tasty STAR voting up in this mess we call a democracy.

Now taking bets on the day Mr. Salehpour “commits suicide” in a hotel parking lot.

These are the actions of a failing hegemon desperate to maintain its former position. If our rulers “leaders” were smart, they’d be going all-in on education and industrial policy, to build up our own capabilities rather than trying to tear down that of our neighbors. They’ve chosen once again the strategy of a bully, which seems to be all they understand. It will fail to stop China from advancing, it will fail to stop the nation’s decline, and it will make them less likely to treat us kindly in the future.

We know from game theory that “nice” strategies which forgive some of the time are more prosperous in the long run to all parties. Where would mankind be right now technologically if the US had chosen after WWII to help everyone build and rebuild, and share their prosperity with others on a continuing basis, instead of greedily subjugating every developing nation, human rights be damned? I can only hope that someday a leader with real power might finally understand this. Most of life is not a zero-sum game, so there’s no sense treating it like one.

Ctrl-f: genocide
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It’s frustrating that so many who even talk about this are apparently too chickenshit to say what it actually is. Israel is openly committing Genocide. History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF.

It’s artificially limited, but I don’t think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren’t actually interested in tenants, they’re interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building’s valuation. It’s also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn’t considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.

The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that’s supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it’s been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.