Oh my god. I can’t get the song out of my head now! Sweet Jesus what have you done to me?!

Hit that dirty birdie.

All the Neo-Malthusian BS in this thread, holy crap. The “overpopulation is the problem” has got to be one of the best ways for governments, corpos, and the rich to deflect attention from their failures and excesses. Hands down even better than the “personal carbon footprint” propaganda.

• earth has a resource distribution/use efficiency issues right now; the rich are greedy and wasteful.

• don’t want to have kids? Fine, don’t! Kids deserve parents that want them, and you deserve your autonomy to live your life as more than a means to an end for demographics.

• if governments addressed the resource hoarding and waste, more people who want to have kids would have them because they would have enough to have a good quality of life and standard of living, and we would also have addressed things like climate change and dystopic corpo control.

Italians making Westerns in the 60s: “Alla come viene, viene.”

we just forgot how to build houses or something.

Or something, yep. We financialized housing.

• Instead of building houses to live in, we turned them into investment vehicles to justify the mortgages and expense of owning/maintaining them.
• A house is now a pension, or a retirement savings account; primarily a place for capital to live (people living there isn’t necessary).
• As such, housing value needs to continuously grow and anything that threatens that value growth is evil.
• Since houses are now a place to park money and the growth in value is always supported, increasing amounts of money are moved into housing. Individuals justify larger and larger mortgages and investors start to move money into housing from other productive forms of investment.
• Industries grow and are created to move money into, and extract money from, housing; investors also invest in these industries.
• As housing becomes more and more expensive, it outpaces the growth in wages of homeowners; increasingly in successive years those who would have been homeowners in previous years can only afford to be renters or own smaller and smaller homes.
• International investment and institutional investment, speculators and criminals looking to launder money get interested, since the value of housing has exploded so much it now looks attractive to these players; home values increase further as this additional capital comes into the market.
• primarily land, but also raw materials and labour become more expensive as a direct or indirect result of the inflation of housing market; increasingly homeowners are priced out of new builds, and investors are necessary to finance the building of new housing.
• because investors are financing new housing, it is built for them; cheap, small units that can be disposed of more easily and allow capital to be spread more effectively across a number of houses instead of lumped into just in one.
• the humans living in the houses increasingly become renters, useful to investors only as a means of paying some of their costs via rent; protections for renters threaten the value of the investment, so rental protections are blocked or eroded.
• in the end, houses are built but by investors, for investors, and in a manner that ensures the value of current investments cannot meaningfully decline.

We know how to build houses, but we built a system that builds houses for investors to house money, and not for people to house themselves.

Can I also recommend Australian folk? Astral Yeehaw - Working, Drunk or Hungover

And so it goes. Nero fiddled, Putin danced.

agents

Also, Putin may need to divert resources from Ukraine and halt advances there earlier than intended.

Of course, if Putin drops a tactical nuke inside of Russia’s internationally-recognized boarders, will the world care? And if so, how much? Could backfire on Ukraine a bit in the short-term.

1.5% of all deaths in America were caused by COVID excluding those deaths from acute COVID we didn’t count for various reasons, and also those deaths that were caused by residual COVID damage and happened after the acute phase.

Excess mortality: “FTFY”

Bargain-Bin Buffett

never has success using my phone in the shower

Me, reading Lemmy replies to my comments and realising that this isn’t what the engineers intended when they gave an IP rating to my phone:

Finished with animal names. Try Crazy Carrot (LTS).

My comrad in crisis, we can’t even keep this planet habitable, or build/select builders for reliable space vehicles after dropping billions of dollars on development and deployment. What makes you think we can even come close to the level of cooperation and competence needed to establish and maintain human habitation on such a hostile world?

Let’s see if we can’t ensure continued habitation on Earth first. Then, maybe, we might have a chance on some other sphere?

Well, thank you for your reasonable response. Have you seen Parks and Rec though? Because your response kind of sounds like it’s continuing the joke…

Could be a 3rd party

But who would benefit from this kind of special political operation?

Edit: I am completely and utterly shocked!