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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I’ll bite.

    Jon isn’t ultra liberal, I’d say he’s on the far side of center left, like a lot of Democrats. Pro-capitalism, but managed/regulated capitalism. Pro social safety nets, but not “everyone gets everything they need for free”.

    The guy basically quit his show and went to the mat for 9/11 first responders, and I get the feeling that the opinions and issues he talks about are his actual opinions on issues that are important to him. I applaud him for not holding back on attacking Biden when it was clear that Biden was unfit for another 4 years in office. I think if we had listened to Jon earlier, we would have been able to run an actual primary and get Democrat voters more engaged. If you find Jon annoying or intolerable now, it might just be because he’s calling out shit that you like, and he’s doing it effectively.













  • Why pay 40% market value?

    How about this instead. If we continue to have rent and landlords, let’s make a market incentive to lower prices.

    Tax empty housing at a rate proportional to the advertised rental rate. Example, if a landlord has an unused unit listed for 1500 a month, they pay an empty housing penalty of, let’s arbitrarily say 20%. Now they have an incentive to fill the unit at a lower price. They can no longer just price-gouge with their competitors to drive up rates. What do we do with the money we receive from those penalties? We provide housing assistance. So now the top and the bottom of the market start to balance each other out. Here’s the real cool thing about this system, you can tie that penalty rate to the number of housing-insecure or unhoused people in the population. Now we can have a self-regulating system that provides an incentive to push rental rates down, but also gives low-income renters more money to rent with.


  • The truth is our stupidty is not unusual, it’s just a preview of what is coming down the pipe for some of you. Right-wing populist dipshits are gaining ground in a lot of countries. It tends to go along with economic hardship. People look for other people to blame for their problems. The real truth is that it’s not immigrants, or jews, or woke women that are ruining everything for everybody, it’s a very small number of inconceivably rich people. Sure, the economy looks great (historically speaking) but real measures of happiness, like the cost of medical care, education and household measured in working-hours has shot through the roof, something which “the economy” does not capture very well.

    Tl:dr, shit is going bad almost everywhere, and if you don’t get the to root cause of the issue ( a few rich people owning everything) then the stupids in your county are going to elect right-wing dipshits too.