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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • Countries anger and provoke each others’ populations by pointing out the bad stuff, and defend against that by censoring or otherwise cracking down on dissent. Articles like this are just attacks against us in this process, true, but I think specific ones like this are still useful, when critically understood, to help us realize that not only the countries we don’t like use those authoritarian tricks, but more or less every one (and those countries that don’t are couped by one or another who does).














  • I used to be afraid of looking at mirrors at night. Idk what it’s called, spectrophobia maybe? Well, anyway, one night I took acid and happened to look at a mirror while blasted off my mind. Staring at it felt so disappointingly mundane that I laughed at myself for expecting anything to go wrong. Lost my fear permanently.




  • Imagine a situation wherein everyone has more or less the same amount of money. They can afford the same number of houses, let’s say, two small, or one larger house. Even if there’s some inequality, it’s not hard to imagine people buying larger or smaller homes and yet everyone being able to afford one. Renting is an afterthought in this scenario.

    If inequality grows larger, some people will not be able to afford ownership, and then renting becomes profitable; those who can afford more than one house will buy more than they need, increasing demand and then offering those homes for renting and getting profit. This in turn increases inequality, but as long as the forces pushing it down prevail, this state can last for long.

    The crisis breaks out when these mechanisms eventually come out of balance, pushing a large share of people out of the market, and homeownership starts concentrating.

    The idea is that investing is only profitable when people don’t have what they need; any solution that gives them that (increasing public housing is a popular proposal here) will reduce profit. In fact, profitability is at a maximum now because of the housing crisis, and even just going back to step 2 would reduce it. A “perfect” solution would give everyone homes at the best price physically possible and with full liquidity, which would sink renting yields to basically zero.