Something completely realistic, right?

Buddy, the world is a dumpster fire right now and it’s only getting worse.

I don’t watch films for realism. I want the billionaires to get fed into their drug crushing machine*, or sucked out of the window of their private jet, or get minced by their giant drill or blown up in their yachts.

I want the good guys to win for a change.

*yes, I know this was a henchman. Don’t @ me

No, just a shitty kettle.

There are many reasons why renting is better for some people and buying is better for others.

Renting gives you the flexibility to just up sticks and leave at a known notice period. You don’t have to worry about the boiler breaking, or mould/damp, or the roof coming off (or like I’m about to have to deal with, a fence panel getting blown away in a storm) because your contact with the landlord says they’ll fix that for you.

There should absolutely be that choice available.

The problem, at least in the UK and probably elsewhere, is that renting is just SO expensive that it’s not possible to rent and save money, meaning that if your goal is to buy, you can’t because you can’t raise the deposit, even if paying a mortgage on a similar sized property would actually be cheaper on a monthly basis.

Sure, you read stories about people who are wonderful landlords, they don’t raise rents, or at least, by less than market rates, they’re quick to fix any problems the tenants have, all that good stuff.

Equally, you read stories about people who are basically renting from Satan and all the things I mentioned above take months or years to get fixed, if ever. (Slumlords are definitely people who should be put up against the wall and shot come the revolution)

I’m assuming the vast majority are somewhere in the middle.

But the fact that you’ll probably rent for at least some of your life shouldn’t drain all your money into someone else’s mortgage. As I said in that other post, housing of some form should be a basic human right. And the fact that individuals or companies can buy many houses and leave them empty because they can afford to have rents set so high that most people can’t afford them? That’s just wrong.

Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.

Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.

Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.

If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.

We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.

*local or national, I don’t really care which

My boss told me verbally “don’t call your colleague a fascist by email or anything else that leaves a record”, so that was nice of him.

To demonstrate the lack of a “clear mandate”.

Yes, Trump will win if he gets one more vote than Biden, but the more he loses the popular vote by, the more justification people have for protesting.

So if he wins on electoral college votes but loses the popular vote by a landslide, at least it shows what The People are actually thinking.

Unzipping archive. Please insert disk 34/2365

Yeah, don’t trust your most critical passwords to a browser when you can instead use a dedicated bit of software designed for saving passwords securely and which will also work on your phone and any other browser you may care to use.

It’s an older meme, sir, but it checks out.

Not sure why you’re downvoted for that. I’m a meat eater, and I’ll admit veganism seems more ethical. But it’s too inconvenient to give up meat, so I don’t. And having vegans around reminds me that I could be doing more to make the world a better place. So guilt.

Probably helped by the fact that none of the vegans I know are preachy about it, so I can’t just assume they’re all assholes either.

They’ll never take over from Betamax…

Sure, but if he doesn’t put it up at the beginning, why does anyone think he’ll pay up if he loses? He’ll just keep delaying, as he’s done all along with all of these cases. And if he wins the election, it’ll all go away anyway, which is the “all in” gamble his while life is basically riding on.

Oh, I was hoping they were going to literally trap him inside a giant obelisk. Shame.

I genuinely don’t understand the mind of an undecided American voter.

There are only two choices in the real world. Sure, it would be lovely to have a third party candidate. But there isn’t one. Voting third party just drains votes from Biden or Trump.

And… they are not comparable. At all. There’s no “both sides” to this election. There’s “definitely not perfect” Biden, or “human shit stain with no redeeming characteristics” Trump.

What is the undecided voter waiting for? Trump to do something even worse? To owe even more than half a billion dollars in fines? Biden to suddenly break bad and try and catch up to Trump’s 91(?) criminal counts in four separate prosecutions?

I don’t get it.

Designate India as an “unsafe” tourist destination and suggest people travel elsewhere instead. Advise businesses to avoid sending staff there for any reason and recommend (not mandate) that they look at reducing trade and presence there.

I’m no economist, so I have no idea how blunt that instrument is or how it would affect domestic or Indian economies, but it’s an idea…

If the threat of a fascist dictator who’s currently liable for half a billion dollars of damages from his defamation (of his rape victim) and his decades of real estate fraud (not to mention his homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, insurrection and arguably straight up treason, Christ the list goes on) doesn’t get people voting then honestly, your vaunted republic deserves to fall.

Or you could vote for “literally none of that” Biden.

But hey, tricky choice, right?

For the record, that is much more helpful than just posting a link to the original comment. There’s nothing worse than finding your exact question, the answer is just a link to a now dead site and the only comment afterwards is “exactly what I needed, thanks”.

That’s worse than the Denver Coder situation.

I imagine almost a bigger issue than the cost would be the… what’s the American equivalent of a Gammon?.. you know, those people that wouldn’t change to Metric if their life depended on it. Four rods to the hogshead was good enough for their grandpappy and no filthy pinko liberal commie will get them to change. The ones that still don’t wear seatbelts unless a cop is watching.