Two sticks you can rub together.

Yes.

Like Russia does?

Israel and Russia remain close geopolitical allies.

Basically what the French did to Haiti, several centuries ago. Kill off all the native peoples and bring in a slave population to handle the manual labor.

handing my friend a screwdriver

“You can use this for simple crafts and home repairs”

Me, backing away from the screwdriver in terror

“Nice try, but I know what that is. They use that thing to build the Space Shuttle.”

We’re talking about rentals, dude.

We just had a major rental catrelization scandal, by which landlords collaborated to keep vacant units prices above the clearing rate to deny their tenants anywhere cheaper to move.

Someone can afford the home you’re in.

I’ve got half a dozen units on my block that are selling above the clearing price. They’ve been vacant for years. This is speculative real estate. The only people who can afford it are the developers and investors looking to accumulate housing stock on the gamble that someone will be able to pay the markup at some point in the future.

you’re just missing the point purposely or trying to strawman and move goalposts

Reads like a Ben Shapiro rant.

Obviously people can afford these homes

Why would states need to implement a vacancy tax on speculative properties if people could afford them?

Seems to be an increasingly popular strategy for reducing homelessness. San Francisco could get 90% of its homeless off the streets with the country’s fiercest housing speculation tax, but landlords are already fighting it tooth and nail

a family of 3 is going to take your house if they can afford it

Why do you think anyone can afford these homes?

Great theory until you get removed from your home trying to make a point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_strike

When you get the whole building involve, it can be surprisingly effective.

the family of 3 with nowhere else to go doesn’t have the luxury of caring about things like this

You don’t think a family of 3 cares when their rents double over five years while their wages barely budge?

You wouldn’t deprive an old man of his walking stick?

The best time to join a union was ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

If Israel didn’t exist they’d have to create one to serve US interests in the region.

Real Biden heads know this

They’ll threaten anything they can to placate a genocidal apartheid state.

Hey now, not just any genocidal apartheid state. They’re not doing this shit for China or Iran or Russia.

Israel isn’t just a bunch of evil fucks. They’re the gun pointed at the head of the Egyptian government, for the purpose of controlling the Suez Canal. They’re the knife at the neck of Jordan and Lebanon and Kuwait, guaranteeing cheap oil continues to flow into the American economy. They’re a field testing ground for the next generation of brutal police and paramilitary tactics and weapons. The crowd disbursement weapons and surveillance tracking tools and social media misinformation campaigns used to break up knots of Palestinian resistance, hunt down dissidents for capture and killing, and to turn Arabs against one another today will be the same ones unleashed at the next OWS or Ferguson protest or Trucker Rally tomorrow.

And then there’s the sheer volume of money laundering. Now that Switzerland and the Bahamas and Panama have all been staked out, Israel is such a great place to move your money whether you’re an international arms dealer or you’re just looking to hide cash from the IRS.

Israel serves so many different geopolitical interests for wealthy western plutocrats. What’s a little ethnic cleansing in exchange for all of that?

The planet could simply exist further back from the sun where the R^2 property renders the energy more diffuse.

Or perhaps we’d use the reflected soundwaves to navigate with echolocation much like we use reflected light waves to see.

imagine … hearing the jackhammer scream of our star

Sounds are a form of energy. If we were bombarded by sound waves for the entire existence of the planet, I assume life would have adapted to harness this abundant power source and made it instrumental to how we survive and thrive.

They were just called Unhoused Spiders back then.

My Grandmother, what big eyes you have.

Some jobs obviously require being on call.

If you need 24/7 coverage, you also need to pay those people to wait around on call. But just buzzing people at odd hours and demanding Just-in-Time employment puts a disproportionate tax on their unpaid time.

Medical staff will often have these extremely long - 20 to 30 hour - shifts because they want to maintain continuous care on a patient. But they also get paid for being active for that time frame. They don’t just teleport to the hospital when an ambulance arrives and teleport away again as soon as the patient is stable. Professional Fire Departments keep people on call in rotation so there’s always someone available in the event of an emergency. The volunteer system yields much worse results, as people holding down households and second jobs can’t drop everything on short notice to rush halfway across town with ease.

there should be appropriate compensation naturally.

But that will cost money. And paying more money means keeping fewer profits.