Whatever you want to do to an ICE agent, do instead to the people living in the biggest house you can find.

ICE is in your neighborhood because the ruling class wants them in your neighborhood. The more you fight, the more they send to the fight. Don’t protest ICE in your own neighborhood. Protest ICE in a ruling-class neighborhood.

Lightbridge Academy?

Not a protractor. Dividers. But the fact that you don’t know that is consistent with your comment.

Modulo is much easier to understand with clocks.

Suppose It is currently midnight. What time will it be in 3 hours? 3 mod 24 = 3. It will be 03:00

What time will it be in 27 hours? 27 mod 24 = 3. We go through a whole day (24 hours) to get back to midnight, then continue another 3 hours, for a total of 27. The time will be 03:00.

What time will it be 48 hours from now? 48 mod 24 = 0. 48 hours from midnight will be midnight.

What time will it be 6 hours from now? 6 mod 24 = 6.

Conceptually, X mod Y means that instead of 24 hours per day, we are splitting the day into Y “hours”, labeled 0 to Y-1. We start at 0, and pass through X “hours”. X mod Y is the “hour” we finish up in at the end. 5 mod 2 means we have a 2-hour day, with hours 0 and 1. We pass through 5 of those hours. When we finish, are we at hour 0 or hour 1?

Anyone talking about action against ICE agents has lost the plot. ICE is the symptom, not the disease. You don’t treat tuberculosis by targeting the coughing with Robitussin. You treat tuberculosis by targeting the bacteria with antibiotics. Address the cause of the problem, not the effect.

The person you need to be registering your complaint with is your local oligarch. Any action you want to take toward ICE, redirect it to the richest person within driving distance.

Rent is the acquisition of a temporary privilege to the use of a property.

A mortgage is the acquisition of a permanent right to the use of a property.

Where a tenant’s rent payment is greater than a landlord’s mortgage payment, the temporary privilege is deemed more valuable than the permanent right.

This condition is absurd. It can only exist in an artificially manipulated housing market.

And yet, it is also the current norm.

Many options available. At the “ownership” level, you can establish deed restrictions and covenants requiring owner-occupancy. At the local level, you can establish zoning requirements. At the tax assessment level, you can enact punitively-high tax rates that are exempted for owner-occupants. If anyone tries renting these properties, they will face the full tax rate; these properties can only be feasibly owned by people who will occupy them.

Let’s start from the beginning: a mortgage is a neutral agreement. Effectively, the lender conveys equity to the borrower over time. Equity is the right to permanent, unlimited use of the property.

A rental agreement conveys no equity. What the tenant gains is a short-term, limited use of the property. “Temporary” is considerably less valuable than “permanent”, so a fair value for “rent” is considerably less than a fair value for a mortgage.

Rent prices don’t reflect this. Even after including a maintenance expense, (that the owner would have to pay regardless of who is living in the property), fair rent for that temporary privilege is still far less than the mortgage for the permanent right.

And yet, the market has been manipulated to the point that rent prices are well above mortgages. In a fair market, people seeking housing would generally choose the better option. If a mortgage is cheaper than rent, they would choose a mortgage. The laws of supply and demand would react to this choice by increasing the price of a mortgage, and decreasing the price of rent.

Since this isn’t happening, we know that the market is being manipulated, and tenants are being exploited. “Fair rent” does not exist: tenants are paying far more than the cost of a mortgage, yet they are not receiving the value of a mortgage.

That is even less helpful than renting it out.

You would have a point if “fair rent” existed, but it does not. In the absence of “fair rent”, we are left with the perverse position that a vacant home does, indeed, cause less harm than a rented home.

A house gets inherited.

The full context of that scenario includes the manipulated market. The scenario you present is only reasonable in a fair market.

In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back

Same thing: the scenario for renting is only reasonable in a fair market, but the underlying context of your scenario is the manipulated market where the value of a temporary privilege is modeled greater than the value of a permanent right.

What about cases where the move is only temporary?

In their initial phase, land contracts are, effectively, a rental agreement, including for short-term. (With one difference: the payment is fixed for the life of the agreement; it doesn’t increase year over year) When “temporary” turns into “long term”, (as it so often does) a land contract already has you covered, by locking rent through the initial phase, then gaining you equity through the final phase.

In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?

Vastly. One includes conveyance of equity; the other does not.

The landlord/property manager retains 100% equity throughout the life of the rental agreement. The private lender retains only the value of the loan. With a land contract, the seller/lender retains 100% of the equity for a couple years, before the agreement automatically converts to a private mortgage.

The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all.

Completely false. Absolute worse case scenario, they abandon their equity and return title to the lender/seller. Terminating the loan/purchase agreement in this absolute worse case scenario is functionally identical to renting. At its best, renting gives you this outcome, and creates new, worst-case possibilities: where the landlord absconds with security deposits and charges additional fees.

I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.

You are describing either a “land contract” or a “condominium”. With either, you gain equity in the property.

Is this so bad and horrible?

Yes.

Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees.

You are actively exploiting refugees.

You are no different than the BnB or the investors. You are on the supply side of the problem. Rent is, indeed, the problem.

You could offer to sell your property to those tenants. You could act as a private lender, allowing them to pay you instead of a commercial bank. You could offer them a “land contract”, which is a rent-to-own arrangement. If they choose to leave your property in the next three years, it was no different than a rental. If they choose to stay beyond three years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and they begin earning equity.

They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.

Leaving it vacant and just paying the mortgage yourself, you are gaining equity in exchange for your money. You are not losing anything. Renting, you are gaining that equity without paying for it.

The only way renting isn’t a problem is if the rent is far less than a mortgage payment on the same property.

Sure. Once every billionaire has been taxed out of existence, and if we still don’t have enough money, we can start talking about increasing the retirement age.

If, on the other hand, taxing the billionaires out of existence is more than we need, we can lower the retirement age.

We could start collecting social security at 40 if we taxed the ultra-rich properly.

Two of the three points he made are total horseshit, but let’s not throw out that last one:

If we could get the average American to start working a year earlier, right out of high school, or a year later --not retire – or work better during their lifetime because they’re healthy, it would generate about $3 trillion to the US economy.

Universal Health Care fucking now.

How long does it take to train, and how much would I earn while training, if I elected to quit after training, but prior to any operational assignment?

Don’t fight these ghouls. They are a symptom; oligarchs are the disease.

Register your complaint with the richest person within driving distance.

Murder? War Crime.

Sounds like a good way to kill social media. Anti-social media will thrive in such an environment.

Sure it will. To bypass the ban, kids will be forced to conceal their identities. If they expose themselves, the platforms will be compelled to close their accounts. The consequence of failure to maintain privacy is the inconvenience of opening a new account.

This ban would teach kids to lie better. To conceal their identities online.

That certainly isn’t the objective of the ban, but it would be a positive consequence.

Unfortunately, the negative consequences almost certainly outweigh the positive.

On the plus side, kids under 15 should be taught not to give their names, ages, locations, or any other personal data on the internet. Avoiding the bans that providers would have to enforce against them instills long-term privacy consciousness, making them better netizens in the future.

On the minus, the kid is now violating the law when they get online. They are going to conceal their online activities from the responsible adults in their lives. Groomers and other predators are going to have a field day.

What the ban absolutely won’t do is reduce screen time or keep kids off social media.

There is another major advantage…

There is a major problem with solar and wind. Daily and seasonal variation in solar flux and wind speed forces us to size our renewable generators based on their minimum expected output. We have to install enough solar panels that we can supply our needs with only low-angle sunlight on short, winter days. But we won’t do that, because that many solar panels are about four times what we need to supply our needs on long summer days. With that much oversupply on the grid, generators won’t be able to command sufficient revenue to justify that number of panels. But we need that number of panels to supply our winter demands.

We can match a large percentage of daily variation with sufficient grid-scale storage. We fill up reservoirs with our excess mid-day production, and run that water through hydropower plants overnight. But it is simply not possible to expand storage sufficiently to match seasonal variation.

If we build out sufficient solar generation capacity to meet winter demand, we don’t need seasonal storage. The problem we have becomes one of seasonal oversupply. The solution to that problem is an increase in demand. We need energy-intensive products that can be brought online in daylight hours from spring to autumn, then shut down for winter.

Producing net carbon-zero fuels could very well create part of the demand needed to justify massive expansion of our renewable power grid.