leadore

I agree, but I’m afraid these days they’d just farm it out to a private business instead of doing it themselves with the goal of doing it right like they did in the 60’s. Today they’d overpay some billionaire hugely for worse results because greed for profit = overcharging and substandard parts and oversight.

Fair point.

“a strong progressive president … like Ronald Reagan.”

wtf? Progressive?!!!?! Reagan?!??!?!!? am I living in the Bizarro World now? Does no one know any history any more? It wasn’t even that long ago that Reagan and Thatcher ruined the world. Please educate yourself. Reagan busted the unions, deregulated industry, massively slashed taxes on the wealthy, and ushered in the era of escalating income inequality that continues to this day and destroyed the middle class (it was a thing we had for a brief period after WWI up until Reaganomics).

If you think Regan was some great president because of that oversimplified account you copy/pasted about an incident with Israel then you’d better rethink how you come to conclusions about shit. Educate yourself – and rethink your conclusions about Biden while you’re at it. Life is more complicated than your propaganda sources would have you believe.

Here’s a couple links about your hero Reagan.
https://time.com/6334291/racial-wealth-gap-reagan-history/
https://www.salon.com/2014/04/19/reaganomics_killed_americas_middle_class_partner/

Unless this is sarcasm, please get real. I can’t believe how many people actually think POTUS is some kind of emperor of the world who just has to decree what they want and the other countries’ leaders obey. You think he just has to tell Netanyahu “Stop” and he stops? Surely you’re not that naive.

I have a set of stretches I’ve been doing every morning (or 95% of mornings) upon getting out of bed, for over 30 years. The only thing that’s different these days is that I have to go pee first.

I’ve always said (jokingly since I’m an atheist) that Christians got it mixed up and thought Satan was God, so they’ve really been worshiping Satan all this time. They don’t want to admit they’re wrong about him being good, so they make up all kinds of excuses for all the horrible things he does. That’s why they were totally conditioned and ready to do the same with trump.

Personally I hope they never do, though it does look likely. Like many pre-November '22 old-time Mastodon et.al. fedizens, I came to the fediverse specifically because I didn’t want to have anything with FB/Meta/Twitter or the other commercial, “engagement”-based, enshittified social media.

It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified, with half of it eagerly welcoming their new overlords (why don’t they just join Threads?) and the other half resisting. The half that doesn’t federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

I don’t consider being on Threads as being “on the fediverse”. My definition of the fediverse is servers that follow the Activity Pub protocol to interact with each other. You might disagree with that definition, but Threads only lets us “follow” (view-only) certain of their accounts (only about 2000 out of millions) from Mastodon. Those accounts do not see any replies to their post from the fediverse, or any fediverse posts at all for that matter–we are invisible to them. So no, he’s not “on the fediverse”, he’s on Threads. I doubt he knows the fediverse even exists.

A stroke can definitely affect your speech, so some people may not pronounce their words as they did before. In some cases it might sound to others as if they have a “foreign accent”, especially if they can no longer pronounce some sounds like “th” or “r” well, which are also sounds that non-English speakers have trouble with.

As for suddenly being able to speak a language they never knew? No. I have heard of some people becoming more artistic or creative, but that could be from damage to other parts of the brain that previously inhibited that behavior.

Before that you had to work until you died or couldn’t physically do it any more and starved.

Renting them out is not selling, it’s an ongoing income source for the owner. The renter does not determine the price when the alternative is to move elsewhere or live out of your car. There’s simply not enough housing–supply is limited. It’s not a simple equation like a factory adjusting the output and price of its widgets. If things were as simple as you say, there wouldn’t be such a severe housing crisis in the US. Just search for US housing crisis, there are thousands of articles explaining what’s going on.

“Investors” (big, small, whatever) are selling homes at those prices (or renting, or VRBOing) because there are customers ready to buy the next available unit.

The “investors” are the buyers/customers, and they aren’t reselling these houses–they’re renting them out. It’s mostly corporations increasingly doing over the last 15 years or so (I think it started around the 2008 financial crisis). They have the capital to do it and so regular people are being priced out more and more as this practice keeps driving up prices.

It didn’t used to be this way. Even in my “cheap” area, when I bought my house back in 2005 all but one house on my block were owner-occupied. Now, more than half the houses are rentals because whenever one came up for sale it was bought by a rental company. This is a serious crisis that needs to be addressed.

They asked if bodies were found, and he answered that “biologics” were found, which means nothing – well, it does mean one thing: No. No bodies were found.