2,443 karma · joined December 20, 2010
A lot of the biggest, easiest wealth made in America is derived from screwing over poor people at scale / en masse. I highly recommend Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich for some pretty good examples of this.
Diatomaceous earth will do the job. It can be purchased at any farm supply store for pretty cheap. Works on fleas, bedbugs, millipedes, roaches, centipedes ... pretty much any little bug with an exoskeleton. Farm supply store because it's traditionally been used to mix into agricultural feed (food grade DE) as an anti-caking agent.
But works to kill bugs, too. Diatoms in this form are fossilized like microscopic weapons of destruction that get under the exoskeletons of ants and other creepy crawlies and dehydrate them. Best of all: no chemicals involved so they cannot develop resistance. Medieval torture devices on bugs; will desiccate them.
Here's their typical MO:
1) Buy the house from the boomer. 2) Put the cheapest shiny sheen over the decrepit and crumbling bones of an aging house, hiding as best as possible infrastructure problems. 3) Put the house back on the market as a "remodel". Use a realtor or some other salesperson to create a false sense of scarcity and urgency related to the perception of "supply / demand", thus increasing the "market value" of the house. Create bidding wars among individuals and private REITs/landlord companies. 4) End up selling it to another private REIT (whose pocketbooks are bottomless) and set the base rent of the hyperinflated value of the house accordingly, thus increasing market rents.
In reality, of course, the house is actually crap, needs tons of work, is constantly experiencing electrical or plumbing issues. The renters, though, have no recourse as they've already signed a year-long lease trapping them in the company's investment. Sometimes a family does end up buying the "remodel" only to discover that the work has been done shoddily and to hide flaws rather than to extend longevity.
It sucks and is evil on about every level. But nobody is reporting it: regional news stations and newspapers won't let investigative journalists expose the fraud either... because the "real estate" section is their lifeblood in terms of ad revenue.
Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.
Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.
Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.
I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.
> but with 2.5% cashback there's not a lot of room to make money from transaction fees.
The cash back is not instantaneous. It does not happen in the cycle in which the consumer buys something; it is pushed out as a short-term liability by the banks, contingent upon Visa/MC doing all the math and allocating the pieces from the top-down.
In the short term, all these microaccounts of customers "cashback savings" are accumulated as points or whatever to the consumer, but they are real cash assets for the holders. Taken in aggregate they equal huge long-term cash assets (for Visa/MC). Just like everything else in the credit card world, it adds up quickly across hundreds of millions of customers.
That leverage is why Visa has been untouchable and why MC has virtually no incentive to make it compete. Merchant banks are already so fragmented (and in many instances actually competing with each other) that the lockin is something they just accept.
This is why the collusion to set fees at 2.9 percent (or whatever) among payments processors is so evil: Visa and MC ransom the full fees for the short term to make the banks/merchants beholden to their terms in perpetuity. Cash back rewards are not a necessary part of a credit transaction, but they're being baked in to hike the "commissions" of the middlemen.
This industry is just like the Realtor industry: full of corrupt and exploitative groups of individuals implicitly colluding with each other to maximize their collective rapaciousness.
The Just say No campaigning of the 80s and 90s didn't work. It became a parody and undermining of the core issue which is the invisible line people cross when they cross into abuse. The IMDB link I posted for mythrwy explains this very well as it shows another class of addicts on the edge of a very religious community: those whose addictions started with prescriptions from their doctors.
Certainly no one has a beer or fills a prescription from an MD with the intent of becoming an alcoholic or addict, but that is what happens sometimes; the invisible line into abuse territory is, in fact, invisible to most people who find themselves on the other side of it. And on the other side, they find themselves increasingly powerless to control. The more isolation society heaps upon them for being unable to "control" it, the further they stray from the territory where it's possible to reach them for help. The Audioslave guy. Robin Williams. Famous people and non-famous people. Addiction is an equal-opportunity destroyer.
To suggest that anybody has the intent to become a drug addict is absolutely ridiculous. Decriminalization helps a society address the core issue sooner (keeping them in touch with society) and saves lives.
Watch the documentary I mentioned above. Also try this one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4079250/ Addiction is a mental health issue before it becomes a debilitating physical health issue ... one that (very often) leads to suicide or death. To suggest that unwell people have the strength to fight it on their own with the strength of "morals" is really damaging to your argument.
Besides: the healthy environment you want to "give people" is totally subjective. Who decides what is "healthy" for whom? Now you're back to policing and criminalizing ... these things do not work to improve the mental health of sick people.
There's a fascinating documentary called American Addict on what nearly happened before this happened:
"In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. He proclaimed, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive(Sharp, 1994, p.1).” Nixon fought drug abuse on both the supply and demand fronts." [source]
Before criminalization, the trend in society was to start treating people who are afflicted with addictions like the sick people they are, rather than like criminals. There was an entire movement toward recovery as a necessary way of life for some people who cannot moderate alcohol intake (or drugs or whatever), just like insulin is a way of life for diabetics whose pancreases can't moderate insulin.
Addiction is not a moral issue; it should not be criminalized. It is a medical issue. It is a mental health issue. When it's caught early enough, and treated with the proper mental health regimen, it does not have to be debilitating.
Instead, what happened with war on drugs was mass-market criminalization... essentially forcing alcoholics and addicts forced into debilitation (hiding / shame)... leading to further desire for escapism through the addiction. It's a terrible cycle, and the worst part of it is that some counties have made things like DUIs into their bread-and-butter mainstream source of revenue.
It's hard to say what the trend today is going toward. The privatization of jails is especially disconcerting; like society wants to trick itself into thinking that the more people it has locked up the "safer" it is.
[source]http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/parado...
Isn't there a "merge" feature or something similar you can do to prevent squelching of a topic entirely? Let the site readers be the collective mechanism that votes or ignores something.
The slug (which feeds on lettuce and papaya) is invasive; therefore this lungworm parasite that hosts itself on the slug becomes invasive by default... nature is sick sometimes.
On the tangent of arbitrary and unneeded flagging, there seems to be quite a great deal of it lately... it's not improving the site.
After I got off work, I tried to find a story that I'd noticed earlier and wanted to comment on, but it was completely gone from not just the front page but everywhere. A completely benign, tech-related story. Makes no sense:
The courts are very reluctant to hear any of it from contract-smacking plaintiffs going after people they claim "disparaged" them. The whole basis of our judicial system in the US was designed around citizens' rights to criticize overbearing institutions (like the monarchy of Great Britain when a lot of people decided to ship out) freely and without fear of repression by the institutions being criticized. Hence the extensive First Amendment protections that came soon thereafter.
Google, that great beacon of transparency, was accused in a lawsuit of using a broad confidentiality measure that prevents employees from ever talking about their work at Google—or, hilariously, from so much as writing a novel about a Silicon Valley tech company without company approval.
This is disconcerting. The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to rely upon a set of public values rather than fine-print legalese. Employees should be encouraged to challenge the upholding of values at every front... even publicly, if necessary, if that company diverges from what it says it's all about.
All of the companies he mentioned own the land and buildings in these 'burbs where they grew their companies. That is why Apple is building their space ship HQ today... they established equity and are now sitting on more piles of cash than they know what to do with. Their employees own their homes in the areas surrounding them, thus building affluence. In fact, it could probably be further proven that when a company does own its land and buildings, it's inherently stronger and more likely to be able to withstand upturns and downturns in economic timelines (thus giving employees even more incentive to work a fledgling company out of hard times).
There's probably a neat little equation to be written to pithily show the relation. Maybe I will write something up later and post it on ecosteader...
Something about the summation of rents (Sigma) paid by all team members (T[x]) in a startup as a function of runway building. To lengthen the runway, the Sigma cannot grow faster than a company's ability to acquire the top talent needed to build out that runway. There's an inflection point somewhere where you can neither grow, nor afford to attract and hire the top talent because of the wasted and sunk costs in rents and achieving "brand recognition" by being in a place like San Francisco. You can't pay the best people enough to relocate there when the probability of overall success is hinged upon getting more and more VC to sustain there.
Interesting numbers, what seems to be evidence of inflation chasing inflation. There's no logical justification for such a concentrated purse of investment dollars benefiting so few people. Furthermore, it would seem that it's benefiting the same people over and over ... the most obvious driver here is turnover. Probably there are a lot of PMCs in SF who absolutely bet on (hope for) the failure of most of the companies getting these investment dollars, the second they've signed their leases. Because who doesn't lose out when a startup fails and has to shutdown? The rent takers, the leaseholders prepared with aggressive litigation... everybody else loses. (As a side note, I'm pretty sure this is how the current US president's family empire was built: http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s...)
In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley, or Microsoft in the Seattle suburbs, but the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, and the corporate campuses of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
Because companies in the 80's were smarter. They knew that if you wanted to build a company that can build equity, you cannot be beholden to the lease holders and the rent takers. They built in the burbs because that is where they could establish equity. Today the "barriers to entry" for owning in SF are just too high for most; the continual delusion of people who think they can build a sustainable business model while being based in SF is mind-boggling to me.
This is where it is astoundingly obvious that lobbyists have no technical sense whatsoever. It's analogous to saying "States shouldn't be allowed to determine their own optimal speed limits based on the terrain of their counties' geography ... or the conditions of the roads themselves. Potholes don't matter. Mountains, ice, etc., ... those local things are all irrelevant. Just tell us if it's a highway or rural road or freeway, and we'll let you know if it's allowing the best speed."
I understand why the telecoms are doing this. The ISPs don't want to have to upgrade infrastructure to deliver on their (often nationally)"advertised" promises. And behemoths like Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, AT&T really don't want to invest in infrastructure that benefits only "the last mile" when they have impatient investors focused on the short-term stock price.
It's harder for a local company to lie to its customers... it will go out of business (or get sued into the ground) pretty quickly when it does. But for these entrenched behemoths, they just don't care. And that is really bad for almost everybody.
:globe_with_meridians:
"*" = [the projects or repos to which this styleguide applies is not defined > /dev/null]
:pencil:
"Rule 8 parenthetical example ()" == "Use present participle as descriptor; try 'Adding feature' NOT 'Add feature' to accurately describe what submitter does during ``git commit``"
"Use the Imperative Mood" == "Error: Imperative Mood does not map to correct structure; please check grammar and re-submit"
To me that feature just looks like a way to add RSS/ RSS-like functionality to links a user wants to share or posts a user has participated in... it can be used for self-promotional purposes, but it doesn't have to be.
It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.
The problem with consolidations like this into bigger and bigger conglomerates is that it reduces editorial independence in favor of a false sense of corporate unification among all the "verticals". The heavy and overweight company has a "great" vision which involves being everything to everybody. But that never works. End result will likely end up providing a lukewarm mediocrity in them all.
What Yahoo probably should have done was divest; instead it allowed itself to be swallowed whole by an ISP whose sole goal (as evidenced with its malfeasance to destroy Net Neutrality) is be able to selectively prioritize traffic in the ways that are most profitable to them... Ergo, the objective of this kind of empire is not to track down the truth and inform people about what is really going on, but to entertain and distract.
The proliferation of renting "for profit" in the last 10-15 years is the number one factor contributing to the acceleration of the division of the top 1 percent from the bottom 40 percent (used to be the bottom 25 percent, then the bottom 30 percent; now it is the bottom 40 percent), because there are no market forces slowing it down. More progressive income taxes could have slowed down the top tier just enough to give the bottom 40 percent a little bit of a break. But the rate at which the top 1 percent's income is growing is now even too much for that to have any effect. They write tax code for their benefit, own lobbyists, get unfair tax credits, and basically wreak havoc on the working class by stealing their equity. The article's citations of median rents in LA is evidence enough.
Current system: When landlords have more profit to buy more units, they control more supply and are thus incentivized to further inflate rents, ad infinitum. Clearly price-side economics favors those setting prices. Rent controls do not really work, nor does any system that attempts to make renting "affordable" for working class people because it's basically just pouring more money into an already broken system. Lift people up and out of poverty by giving them incentives to escape the broken system rather than forcing them to stay beholden to it.
The reason the tax on rental income would work is it would make renting "for profit" prohibitively expensive for landlords. Sure, they could try to aggressively increase rents, but it would work against them because for every extra dollar of rent they tried to suck out of people, they'd only net 35 cents. Furthermore, a fresh injection of supply would hamper their efforts to buy up all the supply in consolidtions. Rather the small and independent landlords would have to focus on keeping their current renters happy (like by offering real customer service) and improving the quality of the rentals they manage. Imagine that!
The solution is to make collecting rents an unappealing and unprofitable avenue of investment. And it would work.
(1) Get rid of rent control; it doesn't work because it focuses on the price side. Instead...
(2) Tax all businesses and individuals collecting long-term residential rents at a flat rate of, like, 65 cents for every dollar of rent collected.
(3) Deposit the 0.65 revenue into a totally transparent, 100 percent "open accounting" fund that awards building projects to competing builders. The builders must build "for sale" units, some high-density urban, some "family size"... the key is to truly increase the supply of housing that allows people to build equity (as the article points out, people who rent simply cannot build equity and that has been the problem all along).
(4) Businesses and individuals who can't afford the 0.65 tax on rents they collect are probably already too leveraged with other people's money anyway; let them go under and convert that "for rent" complex into a "for sale" one. Whoever buys it will be subjected to the 0.65 tax, too, if they decide "making money on rentals" is the kind of business they want to do.
I suspect this "being too heavily leveraged with other people's money" is a root-cause issue for why rents keep rising astronomically and people's wages are not keeping up. Why not build a system that lets renters leverage their own earnings?
I was reading recently about corruption in Jared Kushner's businesses; these detail some of the ways and means it happens: City approves large fancy tower complex, but construction company hires expensive out-of-state workers, fails to pay taxes that benefit local schools, etc.
- http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-... - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/5/29/1665349/-Meet-Jared-...
What followed was a series of terribly bad decisions to turn it into a marketing platform, rather than what it what it was organically becoming, which was a real-time market research tool + analytics API.
As a result of bad direction and big ego, today it is just an extremely noisy, mostly irrelevant, echo chamber.
The trick is they want you to feel powerless and that nothing can be done, that it's already too late. Your original comment shows you are falling for it.
The means they are using to perform this trickery is to convince you that it is too much for any one person to make a difference. "Their minds are already made up". This kind of trickery only works on uneducated and weak people.
The blackouts worked before because they disrupted, at least a little bit, the everyday lives of important people and non-important people alike ... because a lot of people worked in concert together to be heard/noticed as one.
I'll refrain from responding to the snide remarks by rmccoy6435; suffice it to say that if there is one thing that a subreddit can do well, it's help people organize w.r.t. their constitutional right to assemble[1] in the name of free speech and thus show strength in numbers. Losing net neutrality could theoretically take that away, too.
Does not surprise me at all.
As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Unfortunately, it's becoming a textbook case of how massive ego corrupts and destroys a product, a company, and now even a country. It started with the lockout of developers' ability to write frameworks around the APIs and is ending, naturally, with these massive political bots owning 10K+ followers, spam that always ends up on the top layer of search.
My disenchantment had been growing for a long while. Finally shut down my accounts earlier this week after they refused to offer "verification" my ecosteader account. Ten years I've been waiting it out, promoting this company for free, adding Twitter links to websites I build for customers and clients... and they do not even grant a courtesy gesture to show people that yes, the owner of these Twitter accounts is indeed associated with these websites.
Instead, like everything else on the Internet these days, it's all about popularity and ego and bribery.
Apparently, the rumor that the best way for a small company or org to get verified is to cash-bribe somebody who works there is true? If that's what you wanna do, go for it... but at least document your corrupt dollars needed and standards for bribery somewhere, so people can have some reference before they waste their time. The echo chamber and circlejerk thing has gone on for far too long.
The current GOP-controlled administration is implementing a cunning strategy to undermine the safety and freedom of all Americans. These are deliberate actions being taken, with specific goals to suppress what it is calling "fake" news/media, but what most people call facts. The most astonishing thing is that they've twisted and mangled the definition of "freedom" into something that doesn't resemble freedom at all; and yet there are many people who are stupid enough to believe they're actually being helped by these ludicrous decisions.