There are definitely alternatives, where there is more tax incentive to own one home that you live in, and increasing penalties for holding more properties, especially for a long period of time and especially if they are in areas of high housing demand.

OP isn’t directly suggesting making rentals illegal; in fact it’s a bit vague what specific practice they’re blaming. My best guess is that they generally don’t feel laws should allow/incentivize owning so many housing properties, especially if one is not personally doing anything to earn money from them.

I’ll remove my downvote on you if you can show me evidence of the United States (not Israel) piloting bombers against Israel’s enemies, and blocking international interventions, as you claim. Though Israel has done terrible things, the basic principle of subject-verb-predicate interpretation of those statements does not sound at all correct.

I think the recent lesson the democrats have had about “hard tone” probably would’ve come in handy on Israel negotiations too. Rather than being a fan of murdering kids, I’m guessing Biden very much took a standpoint of “not wanting to upset too many people” when asking them not to bomb hospitals.

For one cause or another, the democratic party needs to find its righteous anger. It needs to risk more possibilities of people shouting back “Hey, you can’t say that!”

To be very clear here, my outrage is not at being pranked with a rick roll. I’d be fine with decent politicians doing that on most days. It’s specifically with reversed courses on transparency regarding circumstantial evidence that the president was involved in sexual assault.

Obama gave out his birth certificate. Bernie Sanders shows his tax returns. The Republican Party is a team of liars that shares nothing.

I don’t think anyone claims BlueSky is decentralized, just more fair about moderation. I’d probably be fine with using Twitter if Elon Musk hadn’t completely corrupted it.

It was far faster and easier to build up a feed of enjoyable content on BlueSky. My Mastodon feed has sat almost completely empty, and I’ve only been able to find a few news-reposters there.

And I’m tech-savvy. Imagine how it is for other social media users.

You may want a more recent news update before you claim the judiciary has been responsive. Judge Tanya Chutkan, the same one who ruled against insurrection charges “because we don’t prosecute sitting presidents”, just blocked the multi-state lawsuit requesting DOGE be restrained.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/politics/doge-temporary-restraining-order-chutkan/index.html

It’s definitely a distraction tactic, but at the very least looking at Google Maps and Bing Maps makes very clear to people which megacorps are riding the oligarchy; just in case anyone held hope their favorite “techbro revolutionary” might side with them. PS: Mapquest gets it right.

Buddy, I’ve tried to be more patient with you than other commenters, but that truly crosses a line. Taking someone else’s experiences, and selectively quoting them to suit your own agenda, so it fits your definition of discrimination, is disgraceful.

If you’d read on in my comment, I described how literary agents are inundated with thousands of requests. It is literally an industry anyone with Word or OpenOffice can try to enter into. There are probably hundreds of minority authors also getting turned away just like me. This is not an instance of “defending one’s presence” the way that minorities need to in their workplaces, the way the current administration is scrutinizing them in Federal offices. This is just me trying to be the one in a thousand shot to publicize a book - which is a rare accomplishment. So, NO. You don’t get to “own” and weaponize someone else’s hardship in that way. Not ever.

Shame on you.

Can you link me to the specific comment where you’ve acknowledged negative reinforcement? I checked over each of your comments in this thread and don’t see it.

Basketball teams hire white men frequently. So I’m still not sure what point you’re making; DEI does not mandate a perfectly smooth ratio. And as far as I’ve seen, people are not assessing the policies themselves, but making assertions around them directly to individual long-term hires - based on, you guessed it, race. White people, so far as I’ve seen, have not had to defend their presence under these policies.

This is still diving down a rabbit hole of bad definitions, and devalues both what racism is and how it’s affected people in their lives.

Racism systemically prefers one race over another; not just on an individual occasion like one hiring session. I guarantee you, if an organization’s entire senior leadership of 10+ people were all black men, any diversity consulting would highlight that as being an issue as well. The fact of the matter is, just about every organization currently hires plenty of white men, so that ends up being many levels removed from reality.

If you’re trying to pinpoint statistics around who gets turned away from one particular position, the problem is that companies get so many dozens or hundreds of applicants, you’d be flagging that statistic on enormous groups. Asians over blacks? Women over men? You really can’t make a concrete determination there, and when your source cases are singular anecdotes, it fails the critical definition of being “systemic”.

You’re also disacknowledging the negative reinforcement that accompanies racism, where people are treated negatively a certain way based on no known information of them other than their race. If you’re attacked on the street anonymously, specifically for being white, and the attacker calls you a “fucking cracker!” then I would have no problems labeling that racism. As it stands, even in 2024, other races deal with that situation far more often from police or other hate groups. I would absolutely call much of the “DEI” labeling racism, given that the people making these declarations have not been given valid assessments of their target’s performance on their job.

Okay. Can you point to any studies performed around performance of diverse hires causing problems in the workplace?

Because a lot of workplaces I know that have had “problem hires” who argue with people or flaunt their position have generally exhibited entitlement that links to being white or male (like myself). Do HR firms ever pick people to check a box, in a rush to avoid an all-white panel? Yes, and they could do better in their practices. Whenever I hear that happen, it tends to be isolated incidents - not a habit that leads to a nonfunctional workplace. I admit, that comes from shared anecdotes, but it often feels common-sense. If you’d like to find proof on that subject, I’d be eager to discuss it.

I’m white, straight, and male. I’m trying to get a book published. Every agent that I’ve tried to contact, especially ones that match the type of book I’m writing, has been vocal that their focus is on BIPOC, LGBT, and other diverse candidates. I’ve been turned away at every one. Such racism, right?

Except…most published work in bookstores is still by white male authors like myself. And if I take a step back to look at my whole life situation: I’m not reliant on this book. I’m a well-employed engineer, have my own house and mortgage, and had relatively well-off parents. Little of this is true for these other demographics that have received heavy discrimination even less than a generation ago. All things considered, it is very fair for these agents to champion diverse voices, and they’re slammed with requests all over the place.

The scarring effects of discrimination are still felt decades later when we feel them gone. It’s still a hard truth that employment is hard even today, but those with experience in staffing can usually only point to the occasional anecdote when someone was prioritized for their race - and usually have just as many stories of inverse discrimination or nepotism.

I just recently saw a video shared of an extremist in Maine who attacked his wife, and then recorded himself during a prolonged shootout with the police.

Given that he finds it possible he may die in the next few hours, there’s a sort of honesty to his voice; and it’s scary to regard the sort of world he believes in, where vaccines are obviously “lethal”, etc. The one bit that stood out to me, and maybe not to himself, was his mentioning that he had been out of work for over a year. It’s quite possible any employers saw his violent habits and turned him away, but even if that’s a suitable explanation, it’s a heavy feeling of abandonment.

This is astounding.

I mean, not the Deepseek or jailing stuff. I mean a Senator actually proposing a law. I thought the way our government worked was, the annoying orange declares a vague uncited threat to be bad, and signs an executive order on it!

The painful part is he didn’t even say anything like “I regret voting for you!” It was more like “I am strongly considering reducing the level of my support for you!”

Not that Don needs his support anymore. I almost feel like one of the biggest messages to keep pushing is: “Don doesn’t care about you.” As far as I can find, he hasn’t even put out any comments on the pardoned Jan 6 rioter that was killed in a traffic stop.

Is there any competitor like Nebula that’s not solely focused on informational/longform videos? I come from the age when hobbyists made silly memetic animations and shared them around, not even necessarily for profit. I’m sure many of those people consider YouTube to be some level of evil and would enjoy an alternative that’s actually organic.

My iPhone battery has survived a surprising amount of time, and I’m going to guess that’s because of Apple imposing its own researched limits on battery charging based on what it sees from my usage.

That could mean it’s sometimes lying when it says it’s at “100%”.

On this question of verification, I don’t have a particularly foolproof solution, but maybe there just isn’t one.

I can criticize the modern web for a lot of things, but as long as we have situations where we want to check whether an account is a real person, as opposed to FarmingBot #295038, they need something. I’m not a fan of phone verification, but I’d only criticize it when we have alternatives.

I’d even be in favor of some kind of one-way algorithm by which a trusted real-person-identifying entity could tell a random third party site: Yes, this is a genuine human.

I was gonna say, this level of theft is possible because of the number of people in the store that care if that store is stolen from.

At a Mom&Pop shop, there’s only one person behind the counter, but they have free time to ask how someone’s doing when they pick up something they intend to steal. Plus, any other customers in the place are relatively loyal, and not of the “stand around” variety. At a big chain store, there’s two employees doing the job of five that can barely even point someone to an aisle, and not a single customer cares if the CEO bleeds out in an alleyway.