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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Here’s some ideas:

    • Put limits on the amount of residential property that can be owned by investors in a given market. Something like “In order for an investor to purchase a residential property within this particular municipality, no more than 40% of existing residential housing can be owned by investors, excepting where A) The investor in question is an individual or family who intend to reside in the property and share it with one or more roommates or B) the investor in question is an individual or family who are moving out of a unit they already own intending to purchase another one and convert the original home into a rental property.” Alternatively "No more than 20% of the housing market in the municipality may be owned by entities who’s majority ownership A) resides outside of the municipality or B) who’s ownership possesses a combined net worth in excess of $10,000,000 (automatically adjusting for inflation over time), excepting newly constructed properties intended for sale.

    • Reform property taxes to avoid squeezing out homeowners. I.E. Property taxes shall, in perpetuity, be assessed at the purchase price of the home when the current residents moved in. Meaning… If you’re a landlord, you don’t WANT your tenants to move out because then your property taxes will go up. Also “No insurance company may charge more for home owners or renters insurance than X percent of the current property tax rate.” And “No landlord shall charge more than X times the current property tax rate, where X is an adjustable number slightly higher than the current competitive market rate.”

    • Pin a carbon tax on retail or office businesses in a given area to scale with whatever commute they require for workers who live far away. Make it high enough to strong arm business owners into paying (and charging enough) that they save money on higher pay rates for employees so they can afford to live locally in affluent areas and areas undergoing gentrification. I’m totally OK with employers being like “We prefer to hire local (or localish) because of this tax” to a perspective employee. I’m OK with it being high enough for business owners to feel it, and with business owners screaming about it as much as they want. Affluent residents want to fucking shop locally and they WILL, even if that means local retail has to raise their prices. If it puts you out of business, good. Someone else will show up to take your place and will treat their employees better.

    Not that you would EVER see ANY of these ideas proposed in WSJ.


  • I grew up around the rich. They are short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but with a whole lot more entitlement, self confidence and belief that things will work out fine (this matches their lived experience). They are just as prone to magical thinking and superstitious beliefs as anyone else, but NO ONE CAN TELL THEM THEY’RE WRONG. They lose touch with reality, because the human brain needs honest feedback from it’s community in order to calibrate it’s sense of reality and hardly anyone is honest with the rich to their faces.

    The point is, there is no endgame. It would be better if there was. A BUNCH of the rich believe the End Times are nigh, a bunch more believe that capitalism and innovation will solve whatever environmental disasters industrial society is creating. I know of one multi billionaire (the mom of someone I went to high school with) who pays a Buddhist “holy man” a very generous salary to follow her around and be her full time spiritual advisor. IIRC, she thinks the enlightened will ascend to some higher plane of existence before the environmental apocalypse consumes the rest of us (she still funds various environmentalist causes). Meanwhile, Zuck and the other tech bros seriously think they’re playing Fallout IRL and Musk thinks we’re doomed unless we build a Mars colony.

    It would better if there WERE a plan, or an end game or big conspiracy. We could maybe hold some actual people accountable for deliberately driving the planet into the ditch. But there’s not. Just a bunch of self serving, delusional idiots with wealth and power.




  • Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

    And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

    Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.



  • That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

    On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

    So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.