• 4 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle



  • Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years? If wages had gone up similarly, I might agree. It’s pretty clear to me that communities prioritize high earning tax bases over their existing citizenry in nearly every situation, and in doing so, purposefully or not, they impoverish those citizens and disempower them from the possibility of advocating for change, as now they have to work so much there’s never any time to go to city council meetings or engage in active governance.

    The average Gen Z, nationwide, pays over 50% of their income to rent. Its unsustainable, as evidenced by the insane increase in people experiencing homelessness over the last 5 years. My state had a nearly 40% increase last year alone, and a majority of our unhoused people work full time jobs, and a larger majority have lived here their whole life, contrary to the perceived narrative of people “moving here to be homeless”, which is absurd.


  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldgotdamn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    While it’s not quite as much, I’m in what was once the cheapest town within 30 miles in any direction, and our housing prices have gone up 800% in the last 20 years, compared to the 1000% in the other city I mentioned.

    Rental prices are up about 1000% since then too. My first apartment was $400/mo in the early 2000s. That same apartment is now $3500/mo, and it hasn’t even been renovated.


  • I might not want to put them in buildings under renovation, but those empty mansions could serve as compounds to house hundreds of people safely and securely, while having adequate space to offer necessities for transitioning back to housed life, such as on site therapy and pharmacies, and work aid centers.


  • Lmao. Still nothing on the concentration camps, nor their expansion under Biden, nor the illegal use of Trumps pre-covid policy, and nothing but apologia for Biden using title 42 for 2 full years to deport well over a million refugees.

    If it were the case that more police means less crime, crime rates around the country would be at record low rates after the billions of dollars pumped into law enforcement by the federal government. Not to mention that the average city spends between 30-60% of its entire yearly budget on police forces. Is your belief that if they increase that to 70%, 80%, 100%, it will reduce crime? Do you not realize funding is indeed a zero sum game, and that putting more money into police necessarily means putting less money into social programs that have shown actual efficacy in reducing criminality?


  • Police forces don’t reduce crime, and it’s laughable that anyone could still think so after this many years of empirical data showing that increasing police presence and funding is not correlated with a decrease in criminality. Improving economic conditions for lower classes, however, is correlated with reduction in criminality.

    Biden admin didn’t end title 42, they ended the pandemic which prevented them from continuing the policy, and so now they’ve gone back to Trump Era policy of refusal at the border for anyone who came through another country along the way, a definitive violation of international refugee laws. Even that only happened after years of use of Title 42 to deport hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants a year.


  • Oh so Title 42 didn’t expand under Biden, and the concentration camps haven’t grown multiple-fold in the last few years? They didn’t put literally record breaking funding into the very police forces that have been proven definitively not only to NOT reduce crime, but to systematically oppress the poor and minorities? The democrats pulled out of all of our foreign invasions and curtailed military industrial spending, closing bases around the world and bringing troops home? They stopped the absurd sanctions regimes intended to specifically starve civilians in many countries around the world?

    I guess when you’re a middle class American, you have the luxury of not caring about the explicitly fascist behavior of thecUS government. Those of us in minority groups and the lower classes, and even more so those of us not in the US, don’t have that luxury. US fascism is maintained by force both internally and externally.





  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldgotdamn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.

    We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.

    We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.


  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldgotdamn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor. In this age of shepherds, if one man possessed 500 oxen, and another had none at all, unless there were some government to secure them to him, he would not be allowed to possess them.”

    Adam Smith, “ Lectures on Jurisprudence” 1766

    All states are unstable, because their function is to secure the wealth of the many in the hands of the few.


  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldgotdamn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think you’re missing it because you’re still thinking in a national frame. Capitalists do not. If US workers can’t afford their products, they’ll just sell to Chinese workers. That’s part of why they’re so desperate to get into that market. Capitalism always requires expanding markets. It’s why the web is going through enshittification, also.

    There is no nation for a capitalist, they may play at patriotism when it suits their interests, but in reality they will go wherever they can to make as much as they can. If that stops being here, they’ll go elsewhere.



  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldgotdamn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.


  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tftoMemes@lemmy.mlLouis Rossman is right
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Rossmann was a lot better before he realized he could use his platform as a soapbox for weird right-libertarian politics. No, Louis, I didn’t come here to hear you rant about how much you have to pay in taxes, I want to know how you solved the problem of no power on this MacBook.

    I also don’t get why he refuses to have accurate descriptions on his videos so they can actually be found when searching instead of having to skip through the videos to see, and instead just spams his parts store and a million other things on every video.

    I had a chance to train with him, but went with Jessa at iPad Rehab instead, and I’m glad, because her class was an actual class plus dozens of hours of practical work, compared to Louis’s “come over to my shop for like 2 hours after we close and I’ll kinda just give you crap to do while bitching at you if you don’t understand my ineffectual explanations” that I’ve heard his class is from multiple people who took it.