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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Assuming legally married or sufficient confidence to not have a break-up be a risk factor here. Gotta say that part.

    To me, 4.5% and 5% (taxed) is not sufficiently different to be worth the mind space. If the world was perfect, you should do the CD thing. In real life, there could be a glitch or a mistake of timing that causes an issue with payment of a loan or an auto draft or something, you have to think about it and make sure it’s still paying and your CD is re-upping at a high enough interest rate etc. Not worth it in the slightest to me.





  • Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

    Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

    What happens if you refuse to work?

    I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

    We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

    It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

    …no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?


  • It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

    Which is just a lot of caveats.

    Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

    A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.





  • To “debank” means to kick a customer out of a bank, and no longer doing business with them anymore. So like in Texas after their abortion ban (pre-overturning of Roe) people could sue you for assisting in an abortion, so probably a bunch of banks in Texas went to abortion clinics and debanked them, just sent them their deposits in a check and stopped doing business with them so the bank couldn’t be sued.

    You gotta be pretty far down the rabbit hole to think that sort of thing is going to happen to…people who have gas cars, or something.


  • I know why politicians claim it, because taking away something that belongs to someone is an affront to them the way “regulations requiring manufacturers to adhere to climate friendlier standards” isn’t, but it’s such an annoying instant radicalization people make.

    Finding out gas stoves cause a significant percentage of childhood asthma and some states proposing a subsequent ban on household gas in new builds only became “BIDEN WANTS TO MAKE YOUR GAS STOVE ILLEGAL”. Subsidies for electric cars became “BIDEN BANNING GAS CARS” etc etc.


  • Michigan GOP is in shambles because they elected the “outsider” MAGA candidates who had no fundraising experience, they immediately failed to fundraise enough, it got so bad that their flagship annual fundraiser was a fraction of its normal size.

    Instead of pulling together to right the ship they…immediately turned to conspiracy theories, declared each other to be Deep State plants, and demanded the party leaders “open the books” to show how much money there really was, but party leaders refuse because it would prove how bad at fundraising they have been.

    Detailed in a recent This American Life.



  • Scalping isn’t the comparison though because 1, scalpers don’t reduce the total supply. Any scalper who refuses to sell a portion of their tickets, loses all the money they used to buy them, and the opportunity cost of selling them, and there’s no way it’s worth it for any given individual. The supply/demand differential they make money from is that the venues only have a certain number of seats.

    Which brings me to 2, theres no equivalent of homebuilders in the scalper world. If some scalpers could generate new seats at the venue for roughly the cost they pay the venue for tickets, supply and demand would figure themselves out pretty quick.

    Hard disagree on the last part there. For one, homebuilders again. Their business model is to build the houses and then sell them, if they joined the “sell houses slower” cartel it just means they earn less profit.

    But really the whole idea you’re laying out, the math only works if everyone works together, so it becomes a prisoners dilemma. Because say there’s 20 companies slowing down house sales to maximize profit, there can always be a 21st who gets the benefit of the restricted supply from the 20, but they just sell as much as possible and become the most profitable of all. Maybe it’s in everyone’s interest to restrict supply, but it’s in any given company’s interest to sell as much as possible. So it has to be an as of yet unknown cartel of every home seller in the country and there’s just too many of them to have both: Either it includes everyone or it’s secret.




  • Fleamo@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThe system is broken
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    10 months ago

    I don’t really understand the market failure happening with such a long term housing shortage. By definition there is excess demand for housing right? So it should make economic sense to build more.

    When I ask people always say conspiratorial stuff like “they” maximize profit by keeping housing low but even if there was a conspiracy there should be individuals who are not part of the conspiracy who would profit from going against it.

    So it has to be either regulatory or funding based, I think. But I don’t know of any recent regulations that would cause this nationwide, “zoning” is probably part of it but there was no one timeline for that, it’s super local. And funding has been free for a decade and a half and homebuilding has still been slow.

    I don’t get it.