David J. Shourabi Porcel

still going to undercut the competition as best I can

I and surely many others thank you for that. I didn’t mean to criticize your goodwill; instead I wanted to stress that our housing crisis is a systemic issue and that fixing it is beyond our individual choices and requires policy.

If I charge $675 a month and the competition jumps their price to $1,000 a month, who is everyone going to come to?

You will get, among others, people who can afford $675 but not $1000. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are more likely to find themselves or already be in a precarious financial situation, which could mean missing rent payments. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are also more likely to suffer from mental illness as a consequence of their more precarious financial situation, which could mean neglected facilities, conflict with other tenants, pests and a host of other issues for you, the landlord.

You may be willing to both forego higher rent income and assume the increased likelihood of financial losses, and that would make you a good person, but not everyone is — at least not to the extent necessary to make that choice.

If the competition suddenly goes to $3,000 a month and I stay at $675, and I maintain my place so it isn’t a shit hole, I’ll have lines around that block of people wanting to rent.

Given the housing crisis in many of our cities and towns, you likely already have loads of people ready to rent your property, with enough reliable tenants among them. More applicants won’t benefit you, because you already have enough reliable tenants. What are you going to do with all the additional applicants? Screen each and every one of them to pick the very best one? One that is marginally more reliable than you would otherwise have found?

In fact, raising rent and prices often serves as a sort of ‘customer filter’. Instead of screening your applicants in depth, you can just check their financials and safely assume that whoever can afford a monthly rent of $3000 is also a reliable tenant.

You seem to assume a rental market made up of individual landlords. Although that is a reality in some places, most properties are rented by for-profit corporations. Such corporations compete against each other for capital; they need money from investors and investors want returns. Whenever such a corporation foregoes profit, another usually takes it and uses it to expand, often acquiring its smaller peers. Over time, this sort of natural selection yields the most ruthlessly profitable corporations.

The problem here is not that individuals make the wrong choice, but rather the framework in which they operate, the systemic incentives.

My point still stands

Yes, it does, and I agree with it. I should have stated as much in my comment. I didn’t because I generally prefer upvotes to “well argued” or “I agree”.

respected foreign news source like Le Monde or Die Welt

Die Welt is not or should not be respected. It belongs to Axel Springer SE, a European media corporation comparable in both reach and tone to Fox News Media in the United States.

Die Welt’s latest controversy –one among many– saw them publish an opinion piece by Elon Musk endorsing the AfD, which further legitimized the party and weakened the already debilitating cordon sanitaire around it.

In the German-speaking world, Die Welt is mocked as the “wannabe’s Bild”. Bild is a tabloid published by the same company that constantly engages in both misinformation and disinformation. Although Die Welt isn’t as blatant as its tabloid sibling, it still pushes a disingenuous narrative and should be avoided.

Germany, too, is poised to follow suit at the upcoming elections in February.

They feign concern about the national debt.

Exactly. Government debt promotes wealth concentration: instead of paying tax, the rich lend their money, earning interest on it. They do not advocate for less government spending to “balance the books”, but to (a) make people more reliant on their employers and thus supress wages (“labour cost”) and (b) weaken the state agencies that check their power. I’m convinced every Republican threat of a government shutdown is a bluff.

I would characterize Tesla stock not as a pump & dump scheme anymore, but as a bet on Musk’s position to extract concessions from his political connections. He has got his way already with Trump planning to end EV subsidies that mostly benefited Tesla’s competitors (although Trump may have intended to do so anyway) and he might yet push against regulation that would threaten Tesla’s market position in the US, like federal charging standards. He may also get Trump to impose harsher tariffs on Chinese electrical vehicles than he otherwise would, although such tariffs enjoy bipartisan support.

To be fair :P, English is not my mother tongue, so I don’t necessarily realize how pedantic some expressions I use come across. Fair enough?

To be fair, fearing for one’s life is understandable in a society where gun ownership, social injustice and mental illness are not only relatively widespread, but correlated, and the chances of being hurt in even simple altercations correspondingly high. The solution, though, is not allowing police to resort to violence routinely, disproportionately and indiscriminately, but to address the root causes of the danger with socioeconomic justice and safeguards, proper universal healthcare and at least some restrictions in gun ownership. Those who either aren’t willing to solve these underlying issues or deny their existence outright often resort to the charge of terrorism as both a convenient deflection and an instrument of suppression and oppression. It is in our interest to push back against such misuse and keep the public discourse centered on the origins of conflict.

If I understand your quotation correctly, unlawful gathering warrants the charge of terrorism only when “intended to […] (a) influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and (b) affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping”. Then again, (a) and (b) seem redundant and the law and the judiciary might see intimidation or coercion where we do not.

To the contrary: the value of the US dollar, as measured against other currencies, has surged in the past weeks amidst Donald Trump’s announcements of tariffs, because markets expect them to bump prices and higher prices, in turn, would could prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, just as we saw in 2022.

TL;DR: higher tariffs => higher prices => Federal Reaerve raises interest rates => US dollar appreciates

The incoming Trump administration could counter this dynamic by changing the mandate under which the Federal Reserve has been operating for about a century and bringing it under the executive, stripping it of its independence.

The article you linked to is from 2015 and refers to the original Darfur genocide, unless I’m missing something.

Indeed. I don’t understand why so many people and media organizations that pay attention to Gaza don’t cover Sudan too (they may care, but they barely show it). There’s suffering on a similar scale, foreign powers causing and broadening that suffering and global repercussions through migration, disease, weapons smuggling and radicalization.