DradisPing
No bio...
User ID: 1102
DradisPing
2yr ago
One the issues here is that he was schizophrenic and Vetrans affairs should have been responsible for his treatment. But they didn't want to be and just released him.
DradisPing
2yr ago
The lack of support in Europe is more of a symptom of declining Christianity. When Jodan was in charge of the west bank they didn't allow Chrstian pilgrims, and that dispute goes all the way back to the crusades.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I'm upset that there haven't been more movies made about it. America's second major war was against Muslims to stop slavery... of white Americans. There's was a lot to expore and comment on post-9/11 and post BLM.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Can you elaborate on this? What does "foreigner" mean here such that black people are foreigners but whites aren't? There have been black people here approximately as long as white people.
It's part of a broader movement to find excuses to destroy the monuments of the population that existed prior to the 1965 immigration act. Black people are just being used as the excuse here.
DradisPing
2yr ago
when they do something stupid, and sooner or later the escalation's going to get bad.
There's a long history of shenanigans to delay or stop procedures. Early in his career Abraham Lincoln dove out a window and ran with some of the other representatives on his side so that the chamber wouldn't have quorom and the vote wouldn't count.
My favourite is from 2006 or 2007 in an Asia - Pacific country. The opposition wanted to stop a motion from being read in the house, so one of the members ran up and ate it. Which at the time, the rules didn't account for.
I don't mind these events, they give amusing anecdotes and aren't a huge deal.
The issue here is the hypocracy around the "obstructing an official proceding" law. It's supposed to be about destroying documents congress has requested.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Wagner recruits from prisons, service for freedom. Civilian volunteers may get more sympathy.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Right, clearly the right solution is to used watered down Scientology to audit away his body thetans.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Pizzagate
This one is interesting because there's a strong / weak version.
The strong version involving a massive conspiracy to collect adrenochrome is clearly kooky.
But there's a weak version that's clearly true, in that some rich people like to have sex with teen girls and the upperclass turns a blind eye to some obvious cases.
Eg people in Hollywood, fashion, and music have been having sex with the teen talent forever. 14 year old runway models live in NYC away from their parents and attend fashion parties. I'd be shocked if people who regularly attend those parties don't have any stories about seeing inappropriate things.
Adrianne Curry, in her interview with Michael Malice, specifically mentions how she had to explain to a 14 year old Russian model that the photographer who invited her to a private photo session in his apartment was trying to have sex with her.
Additionally no one disputes that the low end market for teen prostitution exists. Runaway girls getting turned out is a very real problem. Some sort of high end probably exists as well.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I think you're focussing on Mossad too much, the Epstein conspiracy theory focussed more on US intelligence with connections to other allied nations.
DradisPing
2yr ago
You don't really have time to do any reading, but here's the explanation of baseball I've heard.
It's a game of growing tension. Everything is about waiting to see if the pitcher screws up.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Being overly introspective isn't helpful to a lot of people. You can get stuck in your head and spiral.
Sunshine, exercise, and community connection is generally better.
Join some kind of sports league and make and effort do nice things for people you care about. Help a friend or relative do yard work.
DradisPing
2yr ago
What's often the case is that conspiracy theorists notice questionable behaviour accurately but then develop complete nonsense theories because they don't understand the real motivation.
With school shootings the press usually has two goals: bring in gun control nationally and cover up for obvious screw ups by local left wing government employees.
In Sandy Hook the school system accepted money to secure the schools against shooters, but instead of installing locking doors that would have saved lives they threw it into general revenue and spent it. They didn't want anyone discussing that.
Parkland had similar failures. Nikolas Cruz had a hispanic last name, and the Obama admin had started a program to search for racially disparate school discipline rates. So Cruz kept getting put into diversion programs instead of something to deal with his obvious violent urges. Additionally the Broward County Sheriff was a loyal democrat who was linked to covering up Broward County election irregularites in 2018. The press wanted to save the sheriff and deflect criticism from the program.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Today we're going to discus the most exciting topic ever, Canadian real estate!
I'm largely just talking about Ontario, but Vancouver has also had crazy real estate for decades.
Toronto area real estate is famous for being a bit odd. California prices without California salaries. Or California weather.
There's a post on Reddit (circa 2022) showing similarly sized homes in Niagara Falls, ON and Niagara Falls, NY. 11 minutes apart. The US home was listed at $69k. The Canadian home was listed at $1.18M. That was about 900k USD at the time. That house was a bit of an outlier, but average sale price in Niagara Falls, ON was $617,100 (445k USD) vs $215.3K in Buffalo, NY.
And Niagara Falls is outside of comfortable Toronto commuting range, where the high paying jobs are. To get to downtown Toronto for 9AM Google maps recommends leaving at 6:10AM. Median household income in the city is $74,500 (54K USD).
When you get closer to Toronto, things get worse.
So how did we get here?
First cities learned that taxes on new construction were an easy way to get money without upsetting current residents. A new detached home typically has $186,300 (135k USD) in development fees*. I've heard people argue that it's higher if you calculate interest accrued due to government delays, often caused by no hiring someone with connections to work the system.
Combine that with high immigration and there's a significant structural housing shortage. Toronto has 360 housing units per 1000 residents. The US has 427, France has 540* all 2020 numbers.
Next there's the foreign investment issue. Some of the details here aren't proven since they aren't knowable for obvious reasons.
25 years ago China was less stable but getting richer. It was difficult to move money out of the country but wealthy Chinese could buy a home in Vancouver if they were frequently there for business or a condo for their kids studying without upsetting the CCP. This turned into smuggling money into Canadian real estate as a safe nest egg, and the Canadian government told regulators to turn a blind eye.
Things escalated into serious money laundering.
Again, I'll admit this is unproven before anyone jumps on me...
But Mexican narco gangs produce fentanyl in Mexico with precursor chemicals from Chinese companies. The fentanyl is sold in the US. The US government watches for big unexplained transfers of money going back to Mexico or to the Chinese chemical companies.
So they are using Canadian real estate to close the loop. The chemical companies sell the debt to a broker. The broker finds families in China who want to pool their money and get it out of the country. Then he connects with the narco gangs to transfer the money to be used in a home purchase by one of the family's kids studying in Canada.
But back to better grounded discussion.
The constant rise in home prices made house flipping and rental properties common. Airbnb became a driving force behind tiny expensive condo construction.
Then covid hit.
Canada had some pretty extreme covid lockdowns. This drove up home prices even more. And home flippers started buying home far from Toronto. Prices in small towns exploded.
However, the rental market in cities was hurting as living in a small apartment when everything is shut down for months is not fun. However a lot of federal politicians have invested in rental properties. The previous minister in charge of affordable housing owned two rental properties with hefty mortgages.
So the feds came up with a way to turn the city rental market around fast. In 2019 they had issued 404,000 new student visas. In 2022 they loosed up restrictions on employment as a student and brought in 551,405 new students.
No thought was given to where these 150k additional new students would live. See the housing deficit since 2020 as above.
Or work, as they all (and a big chunk of the other 400k) came in with the promise of being able to work 20 hours a week and assumed they could all land a part time IT job at least.
There are mass line ups for fast food jobs and stories of rented homes with 10 students living there.
But back to real estate.
A few things happened in 2023.
Business have been phasing out work from home, and commuting from that small town where they bought a house at the peak of the market in 2022 isn't manageable long term.
Interest rates have spiked. This is worse in Canada because mortgages typically renew at the current interest rate every 5 years. With the rate spike your mortgage payment can double or more.
Airbnb income has collapsed due to economic fears. This is happening across the US as well.
The Chinese economy is in trouble. So many people want to dump their investment properties in Canada because they need the money at home.
What's the result? A total shit show.
First there's the pre-construction market. A buyer puts a 20% down (35% for non Canadian resident) and is obligated to buy the house / condo when it's complete.
People were buying these to flip before closing. It was seen as a safe and easy way to make money. They couldn't actually afford the mortgage on the new place, but figured they couldn't lose money.
The risks were significant. If they don't close the builder does an assignment sale and the original buyer owes the builder for any shortfall from the agreed purchase price.
A quick Twitter search for an example turns up an assignment sale where a 2.2 million dollar home (1.6M USD) is being sold at a 332k (240k USD) loss after agent fees.
It's not an isolated example.
The new ultra luxury condo building at 1 Bloor West, marketed as "The One", has entered receivership with $1.2 billion in loans already in default (870M USD).
The normal sale market isn't doing well either. Ontario is in a weird situation where there's a glut of luxury homes but still a severe shortage of homes people can actually afford. Everything has been renovated and flipped. I don't think they've built a two bedroom starter home in the past 30 years.
There are some good Twitter accounts tracking real estate price crashes:
https://twitter.com/jasongofficial
https://twitter.com/ShaziGoalie
Again keep in mind it's just beginning. Investors are still trying to diamond hands it, but the mortgage resets are coming and there just aren't enough people with piles of cash who actually want to live in Ontario. They can't HODL forever.
Go to https://www.realtor.ca/ and search for Toronto homes over 1.5 million. Zoom out. There just aren't that many people in the province looking to buy homes at that price. Especially look at all of the listings in the middle of no where.
People have been joking, with less exaggeration than you'd expect, that during covid speculators purchased the entire town of Bancroft, ON and are now desperately trying to flip it.
DradisPing
2yr ago
It's probably also conflated in that tech CEOs in general used to be seen a lot more favorably than they are now.
Are there any other tech CEOs that have been turned on to a similar degree? It seems like the others are mostly positive.
DradisPing
2yr ago
No they dislike Elon because they see him as a traitor to the left.
Something happened to Elon in the Ukraine war situation. After helping out Ukraine greatly with Starlink he had some sort of bad encounter with the State Department / National Security types.
Despite being a loyal tech lefty for years none of his friends would do anything and he realized he needed friends on the right to balance things and protect himself.
That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Dems in safe seats (Biden+30) in congress are all ideologically on side with the base. The ones who make cross floor deals are in more marginal seats that they are afraid to lose.
The Reps in congress are very different. A lot of them in safe seats try to keep their public profile low and vote to keep the Rep DC power brokers happy in the hopes of lining up a lucrative job post office.
They form a decent chunk of the R congressional congress but their views have no electoral support. They lie at election time and they'll lose if they are exposed. However they are used to running things in DC (on the R side) without any questions from the base and expect that arrangement to continue.
So this is a precursor to cleaning up the house caucus. Ken Buck has upset local supporters so much that he lost his sweetheart deal for his congressional office and is being evicted.
I'm not particularly concerned about congress being locked up. When it's "functional" it's just going to dump billions into things I don't want it to while performing pantomime investigations so they can claim they are holding Biden accountable.
DradisPing
2yr ago
You know, I find the implication that there's something wrong with "blood and soil" a bit odd. Citizenship is always jus soli or jus sanguinis.
DradisPing
2yr ago
First off the common "Evangelical end of days" excuse is nonsense.
John Derbyshire explains it with his usual bluntness that gets him in trouble: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Britain/flotilla.html
It remains the case that any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles. It is also indisputably the case, as has often been said, that if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were to lay down their arms, there would be peace in Palestine, while if Israel were to lay down her arms, the Israelis would be slaughtered.
At some level, I'll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me — how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.
That just takes us back to Steve-1 and Steve-2, though. The Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It's an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I'd like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.
There's an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I'll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.
So there are a few reasons:
-
There's a cultural link between Israel and America. Gaza is culturally more alien than it's western supporters like to admit.
-
The USSR switched it's support to Muslims in the ME. After that Israel became a firm ally during the cold war and after.
-
Groups like Hezbollah are fundamentally enemies of the west. The end of Israel would free them up for other tasks and put the west in more danger, not less.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Hamas uses a different hospital as it's headquarters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_Hospital
It's likely that Israel did bomb the hospital, but because Hamas was using it for something they couldn't ignore.
DradisPing
2yr ago
There are two big issues underlying Hamas.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Worried now? The Ukraine situation has been in danger of escalating into WW3 for almost 2 years.
This is kind of trivial in comparison.
DradisPing
2yr ago
SF voted to ban homeless tents on streets years ago, a judge stepped in and forced them to allow it.
These sort of things aren't decided democratically in California. The bill will fail but then a left wing group will get a friendly judge to mandate it's major points.
DradisPing
2yr ago
It's pretty well documented that university leftists will aggressively block hires and promotions for purely ideological reasons. They gang up on the farthest right person, get rid of them, then move on to the next farthest right.
Also many on the left, even the more moderate, have a "no enemies to the left" frame of view where they see anyone farther to the left as a harmless idealist who won't be dangerous if you don't aggravate them.
DradisPing
2yr ago
California has a "Jungle Primary" system for some positions where the top two primary vote receivers get on the ballot regardless of party. Dianne Feinstein (D) ran against Kevin de León (D) in 2018.
So a D vs D election is likely.
There's a deep conflict where the left doesn't want to institutionalize people and the right doesn't want to take away the self defence rights of free men.
More options
Context Copy link