Hyacathusarullistad

The gag in this screenshot is also a call-back to S1E05, where Peralta is interrogating a perp and trying to “annoy him into confessing” by playing a guitar poorly and screaming.

I’m about 98% certain that RDM directed a handful of Enterprise episodes. Looks to me like threw on his old Voyager costume one day so the two shows’ helmsmen could take a photo together.

#janewaydidnothingwrong

#janewaydidnothingwrong

You think I’m under the impression that people buying homes today as rental investments are the problem? The problem isn’t people trying to buy into the scam today, it’s the people who bought into it 10, 15, 20 or more years ago, have owned multiple homes for years, make their living off the work and money of others, and go about their lives thinking they’re good people as if they’re anything more than parasites in need of excision.

But if you’re going to start name-calling and denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as “dumb as shit”, I question whether you’re approaching the topic in good faith. I’m not going to engage with you further.

When you sell that house, what percentage of the sale will you be offering to your tenant? Their income has been helping to build your equity, and mitigating your financial burdens after all.

Being “one of the good ones” only counts for so much when the very nature of what you’re doing is exploitive.

Rentals can (and should!) exist without landlords.

Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment,

You’ve already lost me. They’re the ones trying to treat homes as a commodity fit for investing. Investments carry risk. Passing the cost of that risk to tenants, or giving them a free pass because they’re being forced to play by real rules instead of the rigged game they’ve been taking advantage of, doesn’t sit well with me.

They made an investment that by its very nature exploits people. They should shoulder the consequences of that decision.

As mad as I am, it’s genuinely not about revenge. It’s about making the prospect of home ownership a realistic and attainable goal for entire generations of people for whom, right now, it’s literally a joke.

Fact is there’s not really any way to both return housing prices to realistic levels and keep prices steady for current owners. I don’t pretend this is a simple problem, or that solving it won’t cause other problems as a result. But in my opinion the problem you’re suggesting is of a much lesser scale than what we’re facing today, and has less drastic solutions. Using the taxes collected from serial landleeches to compensate normal people who need to move during and following the market crash to offset the debt caused by a now-underwater mortgage could be a solution, for example. And fuck knows the banks aren’t innocent in this whole mess themselves, and could probably be forced to shoulder their share of the burden as well.

But if Bob moves Doug into his second house, then he’s now either a) exploiting his brother instead of a stranger, which most landleeches are less likely to want to do, or (more likely) b) giving his brother a better rent to avoid exploiting his brother… and is thus making a much smaller profit than when he was exploiting the Ahmed family. And if not, then at least Bob only has so many brothers he can rent to, so the worst kinds of Bob will eventually have to sell off some number of properties.

But the goal of the immediate family exemption is to allow families to help each other own homes that aren’t beholden to some shit stain developer or daywalking asshat. Specifically to let boomer and gen-x parents provide struggling millenial or gen-z children with homes, but I’m sure I could come up with a handful of other semi-likely relevant situations as well.

Back to your example though, the lack of profit he’s now making pushes Bob to sell the place. And because all his landleech buddies are making less and less money per hoarded home, they’re also more likely to be unloading their surplus stock at the same time. And if these people all lose money on the sale of their extra homes as prices come crashing down, fucking good.

And as prices come down, more people who are currently renting because buying is prohibitively expensive are able to stop renting and move into a place they own, this freeing up rental spaces.

Of course I’d also support going much more simple and literally forcing landleeches to give their hoarded homes on pain of prison time, but I figured that’s a little more radical than the general population could ever come close to supporting.

Rental highrises are not single-family homes. What we need there are more stringent rent control and to move the majority of such rentals from for-profit property developers to non-profit housing cooperatives.

We could also prohibit property developers from purchasing highrises from each other altogether. You want a new high-rise? Build one. You don’t want one of the ones you own? You get to sell it to a cooperative for a heavily regulated maximum price, and might get to break even.

What we need to do is de-incentivize the commodification of housing entirely. Really make it unprofitable to deal in homes while passing the risk for your “investment” on to the people you’re exploiting.

I’m talking about an outright ban on all corporations, foreign and domestic, from owning single family homes — corporations need offices, not homes, and shell corporations and LLCs don’t even need those. Give a one year grace period, then tax all rental income collected from single-family homes at 100%. Maybe fine them each year too until they shape up.

I’m talking about regulating rental prices on short-term rentals, and capping the annual income allowed from short-term rental units to a value indexed against minimum wage (or preferably the area’s living wage, determined not by any level of government itself but by valid third party organizations).

I’m talking an annual federal tax on properties not occupied full time by the owner or their immediate blood relative. Parent, sibling, or child. Something insane, maybe 400-800% of the home’s property tax. Multiply it exponentially for each hoarded home. Throw in an exception for a second home if it’s far enough from the first (people who own cottages aren’t the problem, and shouldn’t be penalised). But only for the second home — nobody needs two or three or four “vacation homes”.

That’s how we force land-rich boomers out of the housing “market” and get homes into the hands of people who need them, who should have a right to stable housing, who are currently being blocked from the market by vampiric land leeches.

So is the Dutch flag. 🇳🇱

Or time travel, then violence.

See title.

Ooof, this hit me right in the childhood.

This is one of those chapter-turning public figure deaths for me. The last one was Betty White, and before that was Robin Williams — almost mythical figures whose names and faces I’d known since before I can remember, who it almost felt like would just always be around.

RIP, Bob. You’ve earned it.

Apart from my YouTube searches in the last day, Netflix was where I watched it more recently yes.

I’ve done some Googling for quotes, and it looks like Locutus does refer to Riker as “Number One” a few times in Part 2:

“A futile manuever. Incorrect strategy, Number One, to risk your crew and ship to retrieve only one man. Picard would never have approved.”

“Preparation is irrelevant. Your people will be assimilated as easily as Picard has been. Your attempt at delay will not be successful, Number One.”

But I too remember Locutus giving his whole speech about how their lives as they had been were over, then closing with “Resistance is futile… Number One”. Gives me chills to this day, but apparently it didn’t happen.

I love that scene. Data apologizes for ruining their friendship, and Worf takes ownership of his mistake and says he still wants to consider Data his friend. It just made my heart happy.

I swear you’re right. I remember that very line. But on my last watch through and checking on YouTube now, it’s not there.

I don’t buy into the “Mandela effect” bullshit, but it’s a tough memory error to swallow.

It genuinely is my favourite facial tissue on the Citadel.