Week 1
"As first-time homebuyers across the country face higher-than-ever costs, California Rep. Ro Khanna is going after one of the biggest winners of the housing crunch: Wall Street landlords. On Tuesday, Khanna reintroduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act, a bill that seeks to deter large institutional investors from scooping up single-family homes...
In the first half of 2024, one in four 'low-priced' homes were purchased by investors, according to the realty company Redfin. In that same time, the percentage of Americans with a 'high degree of concern' about housing costs rose to 69%, per data collected by the Pew Research Center.
If passed, Khanna’s bill would increase taxes on future home acquisitions made by companies and private equity funds that hold over $100 million in assets and bar government-supported lenders from backing new mortgages for such purchases. Khanna argued that preventing large institutional investors from treating housing as a speculative asset would ease an affordability crisis where demand for housing has far outstripped supply"
78 Lex was silly. 2006 was too angry. Gunn is right the Smallville version is definitely the best one. Can the new Lex top that?
For the 2006 Supes movie I remember B. Singer was going around saying "Donner's vision! Donner's vision!", and the movie flopped, I dont think he was able to capture Donner's vision, or if it would have mattered if he did. The lighthearted tone Gunn is aiming for can work, was that Donner's vision? Whatever. Let's hope it all works out.
Zachary Levy MD: "United Healthcare just denied a claim on one of my patients in the ICU with:
- a brian hemorrhage
- in a coma
- on a ventilator
- in heart failure
.. because I haven't proven to them that caring for her in the hospital was 'medically necessary'.
Tear it all down"
Private, corporate fascism (the latter word literally meaning corporatism) is worse than any other opression.. That's why biz needs to be kept in check, gov needs to carry a big stick, and sometimes bash them on the head just to show them who the boss is. Hint: it's the people through their representative government.
The Daily Economy: "[2022/09] Imagine if officials at your local bank announced that they would start surveilling your public speech and messages, and would deduct money from your account if they didn’t like what you said. PayPal, the online payment services provider, unleashed a furor last week after announcing just such a scheme...
In published amendments to its Acceptable Use Policy, the company informed its customers, 'You may not use the PayPal service for activities that ... involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion … promote misinformation.' PayPal claimed the right to seize $2500 from customers’ accounts for any purported violations.
PayPal’s.. former CEO David Marcus [responded:] 'PayPal’s new.. [policy].. goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity'"
"@anarchoshanties.bsky.social
The Art of War is so funny when you realise it's basically a very frustrated Sun Tzu writing The Absolute Dipshit Entitled Brat Silver Spoon Nepo Baby's Guide to Not Immediately Fucking Up A War, which also explains why CEOs like it so much"
Euronews: "Paris and Berlin are now linked with an 8 hour daily rail service, that starts at €59. It produces 100th of the emissions of flying between the cities"
Molly White: "Not just one bad apple: FTX's practices were business as usual in crypto.. Over a year after Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, perhaps one of the most memorable moments to stick with me was an unexpected one: a brief exchange between prosecutors and BlockFi founder Zac Prince.
BlockFi's Zac Prince: [With] crypto firms, it was much less common to have audited balance sheets because of issues with getting audits as a cryptocurrency firm.
Prosecutor: Just to be clear, some of the balance sheets you received from crypto firms were what is called unaudited balance sheets.
Prince: I would say the majority of balance sheets that we received from cryptocurrency firms were unaudited.
This casual statement about lending hundreds of millions based on scrawled estimates and a 'trust me, bro' underscored the deception in crypto executives’ post-collapse claims that FTX was a rare bad actor with aberrant business practices"
The rest of the junk science/tech catalog is here.
Wiltshire's work was referenced earlier in this post.
Royal Astronomical Society: "Dark energy 'doesn’t exist'.. The new evidence supports the 'timescape' model of cosmic expansion, which doesn't have a need for dark energy because the differences in stretching light aren't the result of an accelerating Universe but instead a consequence of how we calibrate time and distance...
Professor David Wiltshire, who led the study, said: 'Our findings show that we do not need dark energy to explain why the Universe appears to expand at an accelerating rate.. Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a Universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in.'
He added: 'The research provides compelling evidence that may resolve some of the key questions around the quirks of our expanding cosmos... With new data, the Universe's biggest mystery could be settled by the end of the decade'" via @AntonPetrov
NYT: "[2015] The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss... ome were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses... Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
'I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,' said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. 'It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.'"
Captain America: Corporate Soldier.
The Nomad era in CA canon is when Cap was at odds with the goverment, he was on the run following the "Sokovia Accords". Of course the examplar, the shit, "America's Ass" would be against the government, and this is the time period they will focus for that show. Corporate subliminal messaging is telegramming the message "government is bad, look at Cap, you should be like him (wink wink they also want to tax us, so be against everything they do)". Pysop.
"A Nomad TV series is being planned for Disney Plus"
Credit card delinquency rate is highest since GFC. People don't have money to spend... rates will stay low, pro-business pro-growth policies will not work, asset prices will go through the roof, inequality will rise. This is your future.
df = u.get_fred(1980, ['DRCCLACBS'])
df.plot(title='Delinquency Rate on Credit Card Loans')
A goverment of cocksuckers, by cocksuckers, for cocksuckers.. Guess what bitch.. it can perish off the face of this earth. It happened before, and it can happen again.
Andersen, Evil Geniuses: "And 1978 was also a tipping-point year in the economic right’s crusade to persuade people that because government now sucked, all taxes paid to all governments by everyone, no matter how wealthy, were way too high and also sucked. The overwhelmingly Democratic Congress overwhelmingly passed and the Democratic president [Carter] signed into law a huge reduction in taxes on income from selling stocks, capital gains—a definitive turn toward making extra-sure the rich got richer faster..
During the 1980s, federal antitrust enforcement budgets and cases were cut back to the levels of thirty and fifty years earlier. A true libertarian OG who wanted to privatize Social Security, Greenspan became Federal Reserve chairman in 1987 (and stayed in the job into the new century). Democratic presidents now governed like liberal Republicans, instructing Americans that 'all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America' (Carter) and that 'the era of big government is over' (Clinton)..
In 1977 President Carter declined to work hard for a bill that would’ve given construction workers greater power to strike, and it was defeated in the House, where Democrats had a two-to-one majority. The next year the same Congress was considering a labor law change that would’ve made it easier for all workers to unionize. The CEOs of fully unionized GM and GE were disinclined to oppose the bill, but their fellow Business Roundtable member who ran the barely unionized Sears persuaded them to lobby against it—and capitalist solidarity carried the day. It too was defeated. Carter and most Democrats shrugged"
Politico: "Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal.. These misconceptions seem plausible today because Carter’s four-decade post-presidency was notably more left-leaning than his presidency ever was. The ex-president’s peace missions to North Korea and Cuba and his frequent criticisms of U.S. policies regarding everything from the Palestinians (whose treatment by Israel he famously likened to apartheid) to domestic surveillance (“unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy”) positioned Carter well to the left of Republican and Democratic successors alike...
In truth, the pendulum started swinging to the [economic] right before Carter took office, and continued doing so under Carter’s presidency. Reagan didn’t change the pendulum’s direction; he just accelerated its speed...
Carter, a former governor in the conservative Deep South, preferred to point out that there was much government couldn’t do. 'There is a limit to the role and the function of government,' Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union speech. 'Government cannot solve our problems'"
AP News: "Jet crash disaster in South Korea marks another setback for Boeing"
Milman, The Guardian: "The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. But this arrangement of obligatory driving is making many Americans actively unhappy."
"@nutjob4life@fosstodon.org
Continental breakfasts should be served on tectonic plates"