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[Doomblade187]

RE: Michigan voter fraud stuff:  Well, that's definitely one way to kill democracy: make it so nobody trusts the result of the elections.  What a mess.

RE: "the ecosystem": I'm not entirely sure how people think that any institution run by people would be immune from corruption or self-serving interests. It takes significant diligence to be able to resist corruption - both in governments and in corporations. And it's likely more difficult in larger organizations, just due to institutional culture and inertia.  I guess as optimistic as I am, I just can't see how a monolithic government is fundamentally different from corporations; the issue to me is how the organization operates, not what it's called.

its been an 8 year+ project by this point to discredit election results.

Governments and corporations trade in different currencies, because corporations are purely economic entities at their core, while governments have a lot more inherent to their running. They both want power, but they want it for different reasons.

[Great Order]

Remember that money is simply an abstraction of power - Economic power mostly, but it can be converted easily.

[Robot Parade Leader]

Somehow, more trustworthy than corporate america.

It's a really low bar, okay?

I guess the underlying point is that I don't see them as two different things. It's one ecosystem.

Duuvian, I'm not even gonna bother reading that.

It's not "one ecosystem", you're talking about regulatory capture and corruption. Which are not normal processes of a government, and shouldn't be even when the government is clearly on the side of defending capital.

Doomblade is basically right. So is Great order. The regulatory capture is real and we need regulations to stop it that can't just be bought out by corporate interests.

It is just nuts that this happens.

The government caught this weird voting corruption case. They also do things like bringing charges against wrongdoers like the double voters here. Sure governments can have problems but they solve more than they ever create and they catch/deal with it like in this example. Generally speaking, corporates tend to sweep things under the rug.

I also don't get the price caps thing but if that's what people wanna talk about then ok I guess.

I don't get why wages can be capped when the price of other things can't be if we're going down that road of discussion. It doesn't matter if it is through official policy or a soft cap. Nobody wants to pay anything for work quite often. So many people have to switch jobs to get a raise, because they are not going to get that where they are. An egg is an egg and the corporation involved knows what it is creating. A worker can vary quite a bit more from person to person. More to the point is the ratio being blown so the cost of things just goes up while wages stagnate for years on end. At some point, people have to be able to afford things. We were talking about eggs and milk, that's basic food. It seems like the only thing that are seen as sacred are corporate profits. Those can't be cut or even considered for anything other than eternally going up, but wages, jobs, and stuff the average person like you and I deal with.... That's just all negotiable to cheat us all.

It just seems like the game is rigged (although the voting is usually just gerrymandered) and when you follow the money it does back to some corporate interest / those who are currently wealthy.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PWnbYsHVs7o

This is just clear and simple to the people living it. It really should not be any surprise that reasonable people are coming to these conclusion, because, no, it isn't just the fault of "young people." Things really have been sabotaged. There just seems to be this unsupported idea that government is completely unable to do anything and corporate knows best. Then when that's challenged with examples, it sort of gets said that neither is perfect. I get nothing is perfect but we see government proposals for affordable housing and affordable things while corporates just.... keep sabotaging things in their favor and against from the average person.

[McTraveller]

These things all sound great in theory, but what policy (or policies) would you put in place to accomplish these goals?

I mean specific policies, not things like "prevent regulatory capture" because that's a goal, not a policy (and besides the fact, most regulatory capture happens from abusing regulation that is otherwise good, like safety rules and the like that are also barriers to entry).

How would you really do something like a price cap on eggs, for example? How can you put a cap on prices that doesn't destroy the industry (or at least put some farmers out of business) if they have something like bird flu? If you say something like "bird flu insurance" then how do you make sure that insurance is priced "correctly" and is not abused?

How would you legislate the balance between increasing employee wages and retaining profit for reinvestment to grow new business or distributing profit to shareholders or to the "general public" via taxes? (I put "general public" in quotes, because tax revenues are not distributed homogeneously across the population.)

[Duuvian]

That was what I forgot to reference, thanks McTraveller. The eggs thing was two things: the bird flu and for a while chicken feed was priced higher than usual, I'm not sure if that went back down. AFAIK that's why eggs were expensive. I think the response to bird flu is to cull the flock of chickens and that impacted supply afaik.

As to answering your question, I would guess that would be better handled by the in depth study that I'd advise to figure out where price controls are not going to cause more harmful than helpful effects. I certainly haven't studied price controls recently though I'm impressed that it's being considered. I'd advise understanding as best as can be since they are not risk free. My advice is just read up on price controls from sources that don't only reflect what you already know. For example, we know it didn't work out so well for Venuzuela, but has it worked out in other places? Are they analogous to the proposed causes of problems? How was it done, were there any hiccups, and how to forecast and prevent them? Can some knowledge we have now in the future be safely applied as a sort of icing on top that makes the whole thing better?

EDIT: If you search General Discussion you can find some results for "price controls" that may give you some ideas, but I haven't checked them myself. I'd give you a link but the search function is the looking glass icon next to the search field. You can narrow it down to General Discussion there with a checkbox. It looks like B12 has generally been critical of price controls. I didn't see any from me about price controls (I talked more about money supply I think when I was ranting about the economy more often during the recession) except for a suggestion early in the Biden years that if inflation doesn't decrease the government might have to implement some price controls. I think I was assuming at the time it was unlikely, maybe was waving it recklessly at the universe. I think I recall reading about functional price controls in a book of US Economic history that I can't recall the name of anymore, or it may have been a book about the development of rural China but I think it wasn't that one. Either way price controls are absolutely something to be careful with. Maybe it will turn out it's only concert ticket prices that are controlled? I doubt that would be terribly controversial. However there is also the supposed cost of placing on shelf gap. I had read at a time when my local Meijer's cheap generic shoes were over a hundred dollars and I read an article it cost $2 or $3 to put some shoes on the shelf in a study. I thought to myself, "Oh you Pete Meijer, I considered figuring out a way to help your primary campaign in some small way but then you go and make Biden look silly with shoeflation (not the kind you pump up to jump higher!) and made me glad I couldn't think of a way that didn't make us both look silly to your voters!" So instead of commerce, I superglued the sole back on my old pair of shoes successfully. However, I noticed it was priced high on the mens' shoes and not especially so on womens' and childrens', so upon later reflection I can't be too mad about that one specifically and believe me, I sort of get it. I haven't checked the price in a while, because it was actually shoe glue and it held the sole on like a boss. That's why I hope much research is done about price controls before decisions are made. Like, I want to say "Maybe some kind of pricing board or something!?" but I don't know if that's a good idea or not so I added the punctuation I'm using more now.

[Robot Parade Leader]

It's been a crazy day, and I don't know that I have magic answers. Might need to think on it a bit.

I guess since we're now apparently talking about price controls here we go right on time:

https://imgur.com/gallery/this-is-what-we-mean-by-price-gouging-xhsigiv
A room for $6,000 per night to try to get away from a hurricane. Yeah that's illegal I think but I'm not a lawyer.

Also this is the thing we're worried about complete with them trying legislative solutions and have major hurdles once the corporate donation of a few hundred thousand happened.... All of a sudden complete 180 after the corporate "contribution" of money.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkH1dpr-p_4

And if you think that doesn't apply to you because it's just mobile homes, well.... Nope. It's all housing at some point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sihHztBdfvk
Guess if there is resistance to real solutions here and guess who it comes from.

This is what is happening with everything, including eggs.... Biden said he doesn't want to allow rent to increase more than 5% per year over inflation, because there was way too much greed. Same thing with how they said the idea might be to limit the number of houses owned to 100. Also forcing corporate landlords to actually fix up the places and not just evict people for the heck of it. The video says it pretty well. 1/4 of all single family homes sold lately are bought by corporate. There goes up the price.....

I'm really not getting the problem with eggs, because the department of agriculture and probably the FDA deal with animal disease.
This is like a drought or crop bust when you have a livestock flu. There are or should be agricultural floors to make sure farmers don't go out of business. Doesn't matter if that's a policy thing or insurance. The US has supported farms with subsidies for a long time to avoid exactly this and farms going down easy.

Again I need more time but for starters:: :

Make a law against regulatory capture with some teeth behind it. You'd probably have to make it really careful not to get free speech issues or just get rid of the bad citizens united case saying money is free speech. It should be illegal to I don't know gobble up mobile home parks and have the mobile home association oppose the company like hell, accept a large cash contribution and then no more realistic bill.

Cal-Maine Foods is the largest egg producer in the US, but it only holds 16.8% of the market. Rose Acre Farms is the second largest producer with 7% all and all the top egg producer companies do about 40% to 50% of the market. If they collude then they can basically consolidate and effectively act as a monopoly or I think it's an oligopoly, but whatever. break this stuff up with that anti trust thing.

Now I'm actually gonna think about price caps I guess and how to answer McTraveller

[Duuvian]

Cool, thanks. I think that the issue with the eggs is that the chickens which lay the eggs are taken out of production. That means until new chickens can be incubated and hatched from eggs and mature, and probably after the facility is fumigated or whatever the term is for cleaning the place out is. Until then, unless a replacement supply such as imports are tapped, the supply of eggs reaching the market is lower and probably be more expensive. In addition wild birds may be spreading the virus and causing new outbreaks. At least that was the theory if I'm explaing it correctly. It could be there was gouging alongside it that raised price further and I don't know but that's why it should be studied. As to subsidies, I'm not very familiar with them but I'm pretty sure chicken feed price increases would not be insulated from making eggs cost more. There was a really good corn harvest lately so I would guess that at least partly came down, though I think it's usually a mix for egg layers.

I didn't watch the youtube stuff. What happened in it?

I've read somewhere that some part of the housing issue with corporate (rental? I think) ownership of increasing amounts of housing is caused partly by the usual outcome of liquidating people's housing in a trust IIRC after they die so it's easier to divide up for inheritors or whatever other reasons cause this. However it seems like a bad standard for some circumstances, like there are other people living in the house or if an inheritor would want to keep some of the property without liquidating it first.

There was something in the news recently I thought would effect housing values or rental prices... oh some kind of thing is expiring for low income housing in the coming months. I think I heard about it on NPR and was going to search about it. I thought at the time it seemed good for holders of real estate, but maybe I was wrong as it was a few sentences thing on NPR, basically "This happened. Then this because of that, and other something is expected". I wrote it on one of the sticky notes with cramped scrawl that cover me and every surface now. I'll figure out which one after I finally unstick myself.

For Citizen's United, that is actually something that average Republican voters often seem to be critical of as well though the apathy on the matter that comes from being strapped to the outside of a political machine surely weighs on both sides... a problem is that Congress can't just wave a wand and pass just any a bill to the President. In order to survive (unless the Supreme Court was willing to hear the matter after the process reaches them) the law would need to comply with existing precedent. This means it should conform to these prior decisions by the Supreme Court, which may be very hard to do without being defanged premptively. I haven't looked at this one but I'm probably correct to assume there are probably other decisions it would be wise to abide by as well when drafting the bills. That would be how Congress and the Executive could reform Citizen's United assuming the Supreme Court would allow it to stand. The other is simply that the Supreme Court agrees to re-hear a similar argument and changes it's opinion. This isn't unheard of but afaik it's not very common because there is a certain amount of deference paid to former decisions by the court. IMO I do think this is weighty enough it may be something the Supreme Court could do at some point, but I have no idea if it's in the pipeline so to speak. Maybe the amendment process but that's hard as heck even if it's not impossible. On this issue? Shrug I think voters would generally like it...

On things like Citizens United a great resource is available for free at some State colleges with a law school library open to the public. There are computers there on which you can do legal research for free. There is an excellent platform
https://signin.lexisnexis.com/lnaccess/app/signin?aci=ls&back=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lexisnexis.com%3A443%2Flawschool%2F
that is available for public use on these computers. This thing is outstanding. You can look up Citizens United and read the decisions, but also any other decisions that cite Citizen's United so you can see how the decision is used in practice in determining other points of law, such as may be useful for the theorized Congressional route to Citizen's United reforms, if it is possible to navigate precedent usefully towards reforms.

If a local college has a school of law and a library, calling them up and asking them if they have LexisNexis or a similar research platform would increase your powers of legal research 1000x. NOTE: The terminal itself is probably terribly slow enough to make you think "just how much malware is on this thing!?" (it might just be overtaxed I guess), as is the long tradition of networked Dellboxes. The platform itself is great but you have to pay lawyer prices for it as it is a legal research platform. It's really expensive so unless you can afford that the law school library is the best bet afaik since you can go sit down at a computer and use it.

[Robot Parade Leader]

Thanks but I think the issue is more like financial and economic research anyhow and it is a where do you put the cap question I was asked I think. That goes more to how you determine production and prices. Citizens united is a trainwreck and I'm not diving down that rabbit hole because the Supreme Court isn't going to reconsider it and they don't seem to care too much about old cases since they overturned Roe and a lot of others recently. They have a conservative majority and until somebody can reform that court we all know how they'll lean. They have a lot of work convincing the public that they are impartial after all the recent scandals on that. The idea that they'll try to stop money corrupting politics just seems unlikely.

We can talk about the youtube videos though. Basically venture capitalists are buying up mobile home parks or trailer parks, then they jack up the rent but don't fix anything wrong and let things rot. This is huge because a lot of poor people ended up in these places because they were cheap. Of course they got a bad reputation and sometimes it was deserved and sometimes not. It's a bad situation. More or less the person owns the mobile home but not the land it is on. You can move on of these for like 20 or 30 thousand dollars but really most people can't afford that, so you're stuck where you are in a basically non mobile mobile home. So these places were often run for generations by a single family but once venture capitalists come in, it's all over. The rent skyrockets and any services or maintenance stops. The park featured basically gets cleared out because of it and their clubhouse and pool get taken away while the rent goes straight up. This forces the elderly and retired out of their homes and it is wrong. The venture capitalists use shell companies to hide so they can't get made accountable in regulations or whatever. To solve this the residents get the state of Michigan involved and work up a bill but it doesn't matter, because the bad venture capitalists who are going to be held to account for being bad landlords make a several hundred thousand dollar donation and then all of a sudden 180 degree switch. Support for the bill dies.

The other one is venture capitalists doing the same thing but with housing and single family homes. This didn't used to be a thing 15 years ago, but now 1/4 of all single family home sales are venture capitalists and they drive up the price. They don't need a mortgage or an inspect and they just don't care. You can't really compete with wall street buying up houses with cash as quick as they can. The venture capitalists don't need to qualify for a mortgage or have a bank inspection or anything. They just cut a check for more money than the asking price and they do it quick. So, you can forget about buying a house. From there they do the same old jack up the rent through the roof. They show people being evicted by the out of state absentee landlord venture capitalists. One lady had mold issues the venture capitalists refused to fix making her kids sick and she fixed it for $25,000 out of her pocket. The venture capitalists refused to care or reimburse her but instead decided to jack up her rent. So she is getting thrown out of her neighborhood, because the venture capitalists swoop in and don't care. They just want money and will hurt people for it without caring. It's wrong and I don't mind smaller landlords who have to care about the places they own.

The video then goes into how there are possible solutions like rent controls not allowing rent to rise more than 5% per year as Biden proposed. There was also an idea of making it so people could not own more than 100 homes and have to live in the same general area as those homes like the same state at least or close. So far not a whole lot gets through and guess what is stopping it: the same venture capitalists who would be regulated by it. I rent from a couple that owns a few homes but they keep the place up and they aren't trying to set new records for rent. When they raise it they show why and it isn't terrible.

I don't know about the trust thing you're saying but basically wall street caused a foreclosure crisis and now is swooping in to gobble up all the single family homes. So what are you supposed to do when you need 30 days to qualify for a bank loan mortgage and have a home inspection when wall street just throws a cash offer. This isn't the American Dream of owning your own home, it is making some rich person richer without the usual thing landlords are supposed to do, like keeping up the property. It isn't  supposed to be just a stream of income, because it has expenses. It isn't magic and it can't be.

As for eggs, I think the bird flu thing is like crop failure where you can't harvest until you plant again, or I guess get new egg producing chickens. I think that's the practical side of that market at least that matters. There would probably have to be a federal agency that would monitor that. Does the federal reserve do things like that or the FTC? Someone needs to monitor these industries to see if they are making up stuff and blaming it on inflation.

[Frumple]

I'm really not getting the problem with eggs, because the department of agriculture and probably the FDA deal with animal disease.

The "problem" with eggs is they're being used as literal right-wing propaganda, fucking GOP lying about the prices skyrocketing when it's been trivially obvious they haven't been. They're up relative to prices from years ago, but a dozen eggs are still goddamn cheap. Is and has remained some of the cheapest meat byproduct on the market.

Dozen large is like 7 cents an ounce right now (cheapass chicken is like 3 times that and about as cheap as meat gets!). Folks are screeching about it having gone up like 2-3 cents per ounce over half a decade or some shit. It's functionally a complete bloody nonissue, but bad faith actors have latched onto a product where minute changes in price lead to large relative fluctuations due to how fucking cheap it is. Gah!

[McTraveller]

I'm not sure Youtube links are authoritative on any matter... unless it's stuff about axiomatic mathematics or is referencing or commenting on actual verified studies (note a distinction between 'verified' study and 'popularized' study; popular studies are often quite flawed and/or misunderstood). Youtube, and to a greater extent general social media, is rife with Unfounded Certainty.

You are correct though that $6000 hotel rooms during a crisis is indeed price gouging.  So is buying up the intellectual property associated with a drug and then raising the price 20x.  The challenge is writing a law that adequately addresses those issues without having adverse effects on "normal" price signaling.

Regarding housing, the data I could find suggests that "companies" only own between 4% and 10% of all single-family homes, but they do own maybe 40% of all "rental" homes.  Some other data I found says that if you included "small" investors that have 1-9 properties, then you can get to about 30% of the total market.  So really these "corporate home owners" are only impacting the rental market.  I think there is indeed some regulation that can happen here, such as changing the tax laws associated with passive real estate income (but as someone who owned such a property - these laws are already pretty onerous).

Part of the underlying issue, I think, is that people want things to happen quickly. Take rents, etc. Sure investment firms can come in and jack up prices - but eventually people can't afford those prices so will in fact stop paying those high rents and the investors will start losing money, and an equilibrium will be found.  The other thing is I think that tenants are woefully uneducated in their rights, but laws won't fix that - better education will.  Maybe a policy would be that each municipality has some kind of renter-advocacy office? I mused earlier that in addition to companies and labor unions, perhaps we need something like a consumer union...

At any rate, general price caps have a long history of evidence that they do more harm than good; even things like trying to limit price increases to "5% per year" or whatever is not helpful because it typically results in supply dropping so that the prices peg at that increase per year.  The only robust solution to combat price hikes is to increase supply relative to demand.  That's it, full stop.  If demand is higher than supply and you institute price caps (or price increase rate caps), Bad Things™ happen.

The policies I'd look for are ones that incentivize new production over hard caps and that perhaps tax windfall profits. Don't cap the profit, but make taxes highly progressive, something like your tax rate is (1-e^{-price_increase_rate/wage_growth_rate}). Note I didn't scale that to "inflation" intentionally.  This would also probably disincentivize things like the $6000 hotel room or $1000 drug that used to cost $20.

I'd give tax deductions or nonrefundable tax credits for things like selling houses that are below median cost.

[Robot Parade Leader]

I'm really not getting the problem with eggs, because the department of agriculture and probably the FDA deal with animal disease.

The "problem" with eggs is they're being used as literal right-wing propaganda, fucking GOP lying about the prices skyrocketing when it's been trivially obvious they haven't been. They're up relative to prices from years ago, but a dozen eggs are still goddamn cheap. Is and has remained some of the cheapest meat byproduct on the market.

Dozen large is like 7 cents an ounce right now (cheapass chicken is like 3 times that and about as cheap as meat gets!). Folks are screeching about it having gone up like 2-3 cents per ounce over half a decade or some shit. It's functionally a complete bloody nonissue, but bad faith actors have latched onto a product where minute changes in price lead to large relative fluctuations due to how fucking cheap it is. Gah!

I think the overall point is groceries have gone up and they have because inflation is a problem. I think the issue is that it is not really Biden's fault even though he gets blamed for it. When you have a society with a homelessness problem and people not able to comfortably afford food, that is an issue. They want it to be Biden's fault and it is not. The President also does not control gas prices but they blame that on whoever is present or heap praise when they feel like it. The President does not control these things.

I'm not sure Youtube links are authoritative on any matter... unless it's stuff about axiomatic mathematics or is referencing or commenting on actual verified studies (note a distinction between 'verified' study and 'popularized' study; popular studies are often quite flawed and/or misunderstood). Youtube, and to a greater extent general social media, is rife with Unfounded Certainty.

You are correct though that $6000 hotel rooms during a crisis is indeed price gouging.  So is buying up the intellectual property associated with a drug and then raising the price 20x.  The challenge is writing a law that adequately addresses those issues without having adverse effects on "normal" price signaling.

Regarding housing, the data I could find suggests that "companies" only own between 4% and 10% of all single-family homes, but they do own maybe 40% of all "rental" homes.  Some other data I found says that if you included "small" investors that have 1-9 properties, then you can get to about 30% of the total market.  So really these "corporate home owners" are only impacting the rental market.  I think there is indeed some regulation that can happen here, such as changing the tax laws associated with passive real estate income (but as someone who owned such a property - these laws are already pretty onerous).

Part of the underlying issue, I think, is that people want things to happen quickly. Take rents, etc. Sure investment firms can come in and jack up prices - but eventually people can't afford those prices so will in fact stop paying those high rents and the investors will start losing money, and an equilibrium will be found.  The other thing is I think that tenants are woefully uneducated in their rights, but laws won't fix that - better education will.  Maybe a policy would be that each municipality has some kind of renter-advocacy office? I mused earlier that in addition to companies and labor unions, perhaps we need something like a consumer union...

At any rate, general price caps have a long history of evidence that they do more harm than good; even things like trying to limit price increases to "5% per year" or whatever is not helpful because it typically results in supply dropping so that the prices peg at that increase per year.  The only robust solution to combat price hikes is to increase supply relative to demand.  That's it, full stop.  If demand is higher than supply and you institute price caps (or price increase rate caps), Bad Things™ happen.

The policies I'd look for are ones that incentivize new production over hard caps and that perhaps tax windfall profits. Don't cap the profit, but make taxes highly progressive, something like your tax rate is (1-e^{-price_increase_rate/wage_growth_rate}). Note I didn't scale that to "inflation" intentionally.  This would also probably disincentivize things like the $6000 hotel room or $1000 drug that used to cost $20.

I'd give tax deductions or nonrefundable tax credits for things like selling houses that are below median cost.

Those are a kinda reasonable or at least more reasonable than a lot of other stuff on it I hear online.

OK though, first off, I understand youtube videos aren't authoritative. It's just a way to get a point across. People might watch a video who are not going to sit through and read things. I get that is a problem though. You're right on this. I thought it was fairly well made though. Plus it gets across that this hurts retired people who are on fixed incomes and there she is on video tape with lots of other people backing up her story. Maybe it's just once instance of it with the mobile home thing, but it involves trying to do something about it with state legislatures and how that went south fast when big money venture capitalists are involved. Donation and then 180 degree flip.

I think the number of houses being bought by these venture capitalists is increasing. I thought it was about 1/4 of recent sales now.

Look, and let me say you McTraveller seem like the kind of person I would like to rent from and the kind of people I do rent from if you have a rental property or a couple of them or even a few. I don't know. There's a massive difference between you and a wall street firm that doesn't care at all if the place falls down.

I'm all for increasing the supply of housing,because right now there is a big problem with venture capitalists gobbling up anything they can buy. I also think this is distorting the rental market, because what used to be single family homes that individual people owned are now rentals for large companies that are out of state and don't care. I am ok with maybe someone who worked hard owning a couple houses as long as they keep them up. I personally would prefer it if the government owned it, but I get that isn't practical and that has its own problems that are not budgeted to fix. I've had a corporate landlord and they are impossible to deal with. Given the choice between that and you, I would rent from you over the corporate. You would probably fix something if it broke but the corporate ones just don't care.

I have a few rough tax ideas if we can't have the government do it directly instead of businesses I'm trying to put together, but keep in mind this is an internet forum and so it is going to have to be rough.

[McTraveller]

I'm happily no longer a landlord, sorry.

[Robot Parade Leader]

And I totally get that. But if I can't have government run stuff, then I want individuals who are small landlords instead of big nasty corporate landlords who buy up the everything, raise the rents and then just evict everybody so they can remake stuff for more money just because.

I don't want to live in a commodity to make Wall Street even richer.
I want to live in a home where people who worked hard to improve themselves and the neighborhood get to be in control. I'm more good with the 50 or 60 year old couple owning the house if I can't buy it. I'd really like to buy it, but I get that's not something for me now.

I just don't get the blatant conservative conspiracy theory lies:
https://imgur.com/gallery/if-hurricane-had-been-hitting-blue-states-mgt-gop-would-be-calling-gods-hand-maybe-trump-should-stop-signing-bibles-as-rest-of-pedo-christofascist-terrorists-doesn-t-say-bible-do-not-take-lords-name-vain-iJOUKQF

https://newrepublic.com/post/186908/mtg-marjorie-taylor-greene-hurricane-conspiracy

https://thehill.com/video/mtg-says-%e2%80%98yes-%e2%80%98they-control-the-weather%e2%80%99-slams-fema-for-hurricane-helene-response/10108596/

Somehow this congresswoman is claiming the weather can be controlled.... And that is the reason for the hurricanes but climate change is a "hoax." So humans both can and can't change the weather at the same time? How do people vote for her? I don't get it
It makes no sense to me. I want adults in the room.

[wobbly]

And I totally get that. But if I can't have government run stuff, then I want individuals who are small landlords instead of big nasty corporate landlords who buy up the everything, raise the rents and then just evict everybody so they can remake stuff for more money just because.

Personal experience, I'll take a big professional retail estate agency over a small time land lord any day. Unless I'm lucky enough to find a good small land lord.

I'd prefer to live in a culture/ government system that supports affordable housing of course, but failing that (which my own country does), yeah... small time landlords are actually the worst if you get a bad one. Big professional landlords will not care, a greedy small time landlord often pulls all sorts of illegal shit without even being aware that they are breaking the law.

[McTraveller]

That's been my experience as well. Big corporate landlords just don't care, they're just "show me the numbers in the report."  Small landlords that are mean take pleasure in actually inflicting injustice on their tenants.  This latter thing is rampant in many small towns - especially with mixed cultures; the town elite families will buy up all the residential property and rent it out - but those elite also own most of the employment opportunities in the town (small grocery, gas stations, etc.). So they set the rents basically exactly at the limit of what their employees can afford. And some of them even think they are doing their tenant-employees "favors." Or they do it "to prevent 'those people' from owning property and ruining our town!' "

I wholly agree that there needs to be some kind of legal protection against that situation, but I don't know how to make it work without unintended side effects.  I mean a simple thing sounds like "you can't both own businesses that employ people and the houses in which those employees live" but that's difficult to track (on both sides - who do you work for, who owns the house, what is the potentially complex chain of custody in the ownership of shell companies) and a privacy concern.  Also many times the "ownership" is indirect through relatives, not legal ownership, which makes it even more difficult.

It's really hard to legislate against "don't be a jerk."