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Joined 9 days ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • Usually rates that involve small raw numbers get swayed pretty significantly by relatively small changes. For example, Malta had a 3 murders last year, if that number doubled to 6, the homicide rate would increase by 100%. That’s a very significant increase, but does it imply that Malta has turned into a dangerous country? Not really, no. The increase would make it’s rate go from 0.561 per 100k to 1.122 per 100k, that’s around the same as New Zealand which is another very safe country. It should still be noted and discussed because there’s value in that, but my point is that these trends and swings in statistics can be pretty misleading if not put into proper context.




  • Let me ask you this, as someone with a life, why did you even entertain the idea of wasting time on something this pointless in the first place? Do you find it fun? What’s the thought process? Personally, after I finish working I want to spend my free time hanging out with my friends, family, go on a vacation, etc. If I really do have extra spare time on a consistent basis, I would much rather practice guitar, play ball, or doing things like you’re doing now with your car. I see no benefit whatsoever from becoming a committed unpaid admin in general, let alone for an irrelevant site.


  • Serious question, why would anybody do this? These are the requirements of an actual job but without any of the pay. If someone is putting in this much effort, they might as well just apply for a real job and get paid for it.

    I understand that you guys want to screen people first, but lmao are you guys going overboard. The people who view this as hobby aren’t going to put themselves through such unnecessary and worthless hassle, and the people who want a job won’t apply because there’s no money involved. The only people who would qualify and want to do something like this are people who literally have no life. These are people who have no family, jobs, or a social life.





  • Reddit’s strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they’ve been up to:

    • Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
    • Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it’s unusable
    • Do the same with the app
    • Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
    • Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
    • Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
    • Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
    • Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
    • Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
    • Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live

    Truly the works of geniuses.






  • The price of home ownership is completely detached from the reality of building homes, arguing housing is expensive because it’s expensive to build is absolute horse shit.

    I never said the housing market doesn’t have any problems, it clearly does. I’m merely pointing out the basic reality that houses and other necessities are products of the markets. You can’t “detach” them from the market, I doubt the guy who said this even knows what this means. Adding regulations, changing incentives, changing the method of payment is very different from “detaching”.

    In order to get medical care you need to build a hospital, pay the doctors, buy the supplies, the list goes on and on. Yet my country has successfully socialized healthcare for the benefit of everyone who lives here. My utilities are socialized even though all the exact same concepts apply to them as well.

    You do understand that socialized healthcare system still use the market, right? I don’t think you understand what socialized healthcare or anything really means. Your country still pays companies to build the hospitals, companies to maintain them, staff to run them, doctors to take care of the patients, companies to get medical equipment, companies to get medicine, and so on. These are all products of the market. The only thing that socialized healthcare does is transfer the costs from investors and consumers to the taxpayers… that is all. Healthcare services in a socialized system aren’t detached from the market, they just have a different scheme of paying for it all.

    Your argument is completely hollow. Housing can and has been socialized, but doing so is against the interest of a wealthy land owners. Hmm I wonder if those wealthy land owners have any sway on government policy.

    Your ignorance on how economies actually run doesn’t take away from the validity of my statements.




  • Maybe I’m an optimist, but I genuinely believe that big change isn’t that far into the future. Completely revamping the country to go back to dense cities and towns that aren’t dependent on cars is a long term thing, but seeing a housing boom is something that can happen within the next few years. I mean the hard part is just getting those laws updated. Once they are and developers are incentivized to build more homes, multifamily homes, and mixed zoned buildings they would get right to it. We’re getting to a point where we’re starting to see real change in a lot cities and even some states:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning#Rezoning_efforts_(2018-present)

    I mean California, the biggest state in the country effectively eliminated single family zoning statewide. We’re also seeing change in conservative and liberal states. I’m hoping these changes yield positive results that will lead to a wave that will eventually lead to changes at the national level. Kind of like how it happened with gay marriage recently or is happening right now with marijuana legalization and the minimum wage.


  • Nobody is disputing what the solution is… the issue that the regime will not allow any of this happen.

    Change doesn’t happen over night, especially in democracies. The system is supposed to be slow and steady. Our zoning laws started taking place around 100 years ago and then we spent the next century building our towns, cities, and culture around them. We can’t reverse all of this overnight, this requires a long term national effort. The Suburban house became the American dream, it became an American icon, it became the standard. It was was and still is so desirable that it became the biggest asset for most families, and this led to it’s own wave of restrictive and discriminatory zoning laws. It took the housing crash in 2008 for us to revisit our zoning laws and look at them critically, and after a decade of criticism and effort, we’ve only started seeing reforms on local and state levels in the past 5 or so years. We’ve still got a long way to go to meaningful national change, but we’re heading in the right direction. You just have to vote for the candidates that will make the changes and tell people about the problems with out zoning laws, because most people don’t even know.

    I don’t see how that’s a conspiracy since it it is happening before out eyes. Give some limp services about 5 “affordable” units in 1000 unit lux condo. That’s where we are at now.

    Developers keep building these ultra luxury condo towers because they’re only ones our zoning laws allow to be economically viable. There’s a reason why this country only has two extremes between massive skyscrapers and single family homes, while most other countries have an in between.

    Fun fact: vast majority people in Romania own their property outright.

    Yeah now because they’ve made reforms to allow for ownership back in the 90s. During the communist era, people couldn’t own land.


  • This is such juvenile take. We’re not going to turn our country into an authoritarian technocracy to implement a solution that is almost guaranteed to fail anywhere outside of an authoritarian city state. Singapore is not a model for any country, they are the anomaly in the world. We can’t copy and paste. Other countries have tried the same idea and they all have failed. Romania, the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, China, etc. Our housing solution can’t be built on childish ideals, they have to be pragamtic and they have to take into account our political system, our culture, our strengths, and our problems. When we look into our own history, we can see that we already solved our housing crises multiple times before. When there’s a housing shortage, we have incentivize the market to flood the market with new units. This will drive down prices and increase inventory, which is exactly what we need. It’s a tried and true method. The adjustments we need to make are basic too, we just have update our zoning laws remove outdated restrictions that outlaw mixed zoning and multifamily housing, as well as give local and regional municipalities more power and flexibility to design towns and cities around more than just cars.


  • Vienna is an interesting case because it’s one of the few democratic countries where the majority of the country isn’t too opposed to subsidizing the housing of a single city without enjoying any of the benefits. I guess when the model can work when there’s more people putting money into it than people who can actually enjoy it. Speaking of which, this system still has it’s issues though. Everybody wants to live in these units, but not everybody can get one. In order to get one you have to apply and most likely be put on a waitlist. Some of these wait lists are brutal because there’s only 5000-7000 units available. It’s gotten bad to the point where people are turning more and more towards private housing. Even with the limited number of units, the city is actually struggling to maintain the system because of inflation and other factors.