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[lemon10]

Power's went out like five times in the past week. Typically only for a few hours each time, but its really godamn annoying, especially with the power outages we had last month (where our power was out for like 3 days straight).
Godamn privatization of public goods.

No, giving private companies monopolies over the utilities is not a godamn good idea. Ugh. I'm in cali if anyone is interested.
E: Oops, wrong thread. :/

[Random_Dragon]

This legislation will allow more people to buy homes in 5 years.

I needed a good laugh, thanks. There's no way in fucking hell that there's going to be a reasonable uptick in home ownership, let alone from a fairly small bit

I mean, I could START with the phenomenon of companies actively trying to buy up available properties with the explicit intent of only letting people rent them, and it being actively desirable to those sorts of scumbags to artificially sustain and exacerbate the existing housing shortage shit...

I could elaborate quite a lot on this first point before even getting to any other issues that'd make this idea of one debt relief bill having any discernible impact on unfucking this one particular mess utterly absurd.

[EuchreJack]

This legislation will allow more people to buy homes in 5 years.

I needed a good laugh, thanks. There's no way in fucking hell that there's going to be a reasonable uptick in home ownership, let alone from a fairly small bit

I mean, I could START with the phenomenon of companies actively trying to buy up available properties with the explicit intent of only letting people rent them, and it being actively desirable to those sorts of scumbags to artificially sustain and exacerbate the existing housing shortage shit...

I could elaborate quite a lot on this first point before even getting to any other issues that'd make this idea of one debt relief bill having any discernible impact on unfucking this one particular mess utterly absurd.

Hm, I'd actually like to hear more about that, so I'll create a new thread.

[Random_Dragon]

I'm not very good at explaining things all that well, plus doesn't seem like it's that immediately worth a whole new thread for, but in a rough nutshell home ownership is a right big pain in the ass for people these days. Technically the biggest reasons all amount to some form of "overall ability to actually afford to become a homeowner is lower" while some of it is the aforementioned maliciousness that I focused on first.

So basically cost goes up and ability to pay that cost goes down. We've seen it with stuff like how wage levels (including minimum wage as the go-to example) have stagnated while prices, or inflation, or whatever else it's compared to goes up anyway. In a nutshell, a few decades ago someone fresh out of college could work towards home ownership basically right off the bat when today that would be out of reach of most people in general.

It's barely after midnight and my brain is turning to mush, but hope that summarizes the vague gist of what I wanted to try and summarize better. I blame it being a long week.

[EuchreJack]

I'm not very good at explaining things all that well, plus doesn't seem like it's that immediately worth a whole new thread for, but in a rough nutshell home ownership is a right big pain in the ass for people these days. Technically the biggest reasons all amount to some form of "overall ability to actually afford to become a homeowner is lower" while some of it is the aforementioned maliciousness that I focused on first.

So basically cost goes up and ability to pay that cost goes down. We've seen it with stuff like how wage levels (including minimum wage as the go-to example) have stagnated while prices, or inflation, or whatever else it's compared to goes up anyway. In a nutshell, a few decades ago someone fresh out of college could work towards home ownership basically right off the bat when today that would be out of reach of most people in general.

It's barely after midnight and my brain is turning to mush, but hope that summarizes the vague gist of what I wanted to try and summarize better. I blame it being a long week.

Fair enough.
In my State (New York), there is a whole lot of pain to being a landlord, so I found it strange that anyone for-profit would be interested in being MORE of a landlord.  But I have seen corporations buying homes to rent them out.
I'd hardly call it malicious: They're FOR-Profit. They see more profit in buying and renting homes than in buying and selling homes.

The developer cycle is the following: 1) Buy up property 2) Fix up property *optional* 3) Rent out Property 4) Borrow against Property 5) Stop paying Mortgage 6) Property gets sold at auction, usually to someone that repeats the cycle since you need a wad of cash for those auctions

[Random_Dragon]

I return from trying and failing to sleep to share an unrelated small point about the new law stuff. Evidently it also includes a cap on interest rate for student loans. The thought came up to me, while musing that it'd be fucking nice if this concept was applied to all types of loans to put a dent in the universal practice of predatory lending, that this is the first time I can recall seeing anything resembling an anti-usury law implemented in the US (note this is probably not actually the first law or even fragment of a law that could warrant the term but it's like almost 3 AM and brain scrambled egg right now due to IRL stress).

So the word usury comes to mind and that means it's time for another antiquity and/or medieval history and/or religious history shitpost, now with 200% more 3 AM brain. Historically, usury was rather frowned upon. To cover the theological bit of today's history trivia in brief:

If thou lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with thee, thou shalt not be to him as a creditor; neither shall ye lay upon him interest. If thou at all take thy neighbour’s garment to pledge, thou shalt restore it unto him by that the sun goeth down; for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin; wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.

With the obligatory "oops Rome kicked everyone's asses, spread the Jewish people and their weird martyr-worshiping relatives across the empire, and now the latter is doing that weird monotheist thing that made Rome so asskick-happy last time" period out of the way, early christianity latched onto the idea that all interest was usury, and that all usury was bad, by about the 300s or so. The council of Nicea, important as it was for a lot of "making emperor Constantine happy so he'll keep our religion legalized" reasons, one of the things to come up was the idea that clergy were forbidden from charging interest.

Later on they'd go on to say that this applies to the laity. This a fancy way of saying, effectively: "Remember how Jesus said you can't serve God and money? Let's take a trip down memory lane." Bonus points for making the modern CEO cry (if they had tear ducts), in 1311 the council of Vienne went so far as to say that belief in the right to usury is full-on heresy. The virgin "outlawing the right to not bleed out from a miscarriage" vs the chad "outlawing the right to be a loan shark", because business ethics does not exist.

Meanwhile on the other major branch of Rome's unending struggle against monotheism, Judaism weathered the bullshit long enough for the Empire to regard them as a traditional religion by the time Constantine's immediate predecessor came around, thus letting them enjoy The Comedy of Emperor Diocletian The Jovian:

Spoiler: A relevant image from a previous history post (click to show/hide)

However, one constant point of disagreement kept popping up every so often: usury is bad, but is it bad all the time or only bad when done to fellow victims of Roman fuckery? Those who remember previous episodes will recall that Diocletion's wrath found a target that had spend the past century or two vigorously distancing itself from Judaism. As you can probably guess, every time the question came up and:
1. Someone decided to answer "no"
2. That someone had a job that let them actually charge interest.
3. No one derailed things with the third answer of "hey wait technically they're also victims of Roman fuckery"

Cue a now-infamous stereotype being talked about by the errant former hippie offshoot of the Roman Fuckery Cinematic Universe since they were usually in charge by now, violence ensues, rinse and repeat. And whoever survives learns zero lessons, when both "usury is usury" and "Abrahamic is Abrahamic" were on the table. You may complete this for me by making the "Mr. Incredible yelling X is X" meme of your choice.

As for how to wrap this pile of useless trivia into finally explaining how we got to the corporate hellscape we live in now? Uh...either the pope being too busy screaming at a disgruntled German man to scream about other heresy, people finding loopholes that let them discover that investments actually do kinda help for megaprojects despite the Egyptian method of throwing beer at peasants in the summertime being infinitely more based, or blame the Knights Templar being accused of assimilating muslim practices as a way to get their shit stolen by the king of France. Probably 1d3 of those.

As I now really need to go the fuck to sleep and we're dipping into post-medieval history where I'm not an infinite wellspring of useless trivia, I'll have to conclude things with the above cliffhanger. Tune in next time for why mangled French gave edgy teenagers a fictional name for Satan. Hint: it involves the king of France stealing shit.

EDIT: In lieu of going the fuck to sleep, I took the above joking suggestion of "make your own X is X meme" and made this mangled combination shitpost:

Spoiler: brain please just let me sleep (click to show/hide)

Will give you a history shitpost on the Knights Templar after I've had some actual sleep.

[EuchreJack]

We have anti-usury laws on the books in the US. Generally, any interest over 20% is illegal. Of course, some financial institutions try to get around that. Rent-to-own comes to mind.

Ultimately, like all business, if nobody can make a decent profit doing it, nobody will (except the government).

I LOVE me some Knights Templar discussion, but maybe it should go somewhere other than AmeriPol? But hey, if you want it here, I guess more formal AmeriPol discussion can just work around it.

[Random_Dragon]

Nice, just first recent bit I've seen come up in a while. And very tempting, but I'm not sure I could stretch my repertoire of medieval and religious history shitposts into a thread's worth of content. Maybe I'll save it for another page or so down the line.

[Dostoevsky]

Circling back for a minute to the loan forgiveness, it's worth keeping in mind that the 10k/20k number is misleading in a few ways. It's not sending out $10,000 checks, it's loan forgiveness. Which on the one hand means that thanks to the magic of interest the amount of money a person 'gains' is actually significantly higher, but also means that it's gained/kept over the life of the loan (which is typically 10 or 30 years, but can be different).

Assuming a 10 year payment plan, 10k works out to about $115 per month at the moment. (For a 30 year loan, about half that - yes, you pay an awful lot of interest on the 30 year loan.) For the average person this won't exactly blow their financial options wide open. But for a person barely making ends meet (or getting wage-garnished thanks to making too little to make the full payment) this should bring some quality of life.

[hector13]

That is one thing that does bother me about people saying the tax payers are bearing the burden, ‘cause they’re not. It’s money owed, not money already there. Taxes aren’t increasing as a result of this.

Equally so, as above, extra money in someone’s pocket, particularly the pocket of someone who doesn’t
earn that much, is money that will be put back into the economy and will be taxed accordingly.

As an aside, it’s also one of the reasons trickle down economics is bullshit. You give a millionaire a million dollars, they’ll save it. You give a million people a dollar, they’ll spend it.

[EuchreJack]

As an aside, it’s also one of the reasons trickle down economics is bullshit. You give a millionaire a million dollars, they’ll save it. You give a million people a dollar, they’ll spend it.

Ah, but if I give a millionaire a million dollars, they'll contribute a few thousand to my next election campaign. If I give a million people a dollar, maybe a handful of them will vote for me, but most will just be pissed they only got a dollar.

[MorleyDev]

The redacted affidavit for the Mar-a-Lago search has been released by the DOJ.

[EuchreJack]

Nice!

Damn, that is a LOT of redaction.

[MorleyDev]

Yeah, although it does reveal that this isn't just some wrangling over a few 'souvenirs', but there's a definitive criminal investigation element to this (including the breaking of at least three federal laws).

Also there's this nugget:

The FBI's investigation has established that documents bearing classification markings, which appear to contain National Defense Information (NDI), were among the materials contained in the FIFTEEN BOXES and were stored at the PREMISES in an authourized location. Further, there is probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified NDI or that are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the PREMISES. There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES.

Remember how Muller said in his report that he couldn't comment on whether there was obstruction of justice because of the FPOTUS being a sitting President and thus that a matter for the House? Well, it looks like the F means that the DOJ has determined they *can* make that judgement so it's factoring into their investigation.

My completely amateur suspiscion, based solely on that I doubt the obstruction thing would be mentioned there unless it was also mentioned later on in the report too but it's nowhere in the unredacted sections apart from there, is that one of the huge redacted sections is titled "There is Probable Cause to Believe That Documents Containing Records Relevant To Efforts By Individuals Connected to the FPOTUS To Obstruct The Course Of Justice Are Present on the Premises" and that's why it was redacted like crazy. Probably 62-69, since 'SUBJECT OFFENSES' appears after that in a following section (and the I think the all-caps means they defined it as referring to a specific thing earlier in the document, a definition that is lacking in the unredacted sections).

Of course I could be completely wrong.

[scriver]

Nice!

Damn, that is a LOT of redaction.

Worst SCP ever