Plus, why do people act like the “incumbent advantage” is some magical advantage? It’s a cargo cult mentality, especially in this day and age where all the old “rules” about elections have gone out the window.

I mean, I remember the day where being twice-impeached and a convicted felon would be unrecoverable political death, yet here we are staring down the barrel of a possible second Trump term.

Biden is a historically unpopular president, who is behind in basically all polling in basically every key swing state, and who just had the mother of all “the emperor has no clothes” moments on national television, losing the confidence of his own base. Even Democratic congresspeople are calling on him to step down now.

There is simply no path forwards for Biden to win in November. He’s cooked.

As for replacements, personally, I think Gretchen Whitmer is the best choice. Relatively young, good compromise candidate between the progressive and moderate wings of the party, current beloved governor of Michigan (key swing state!), competent technocrat, no significant political baggage, and made a name for herself protecting abortion rights in Michigan after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.

Is the GOP actually the ones wanting us to replace Biden at the moment? If anything, there’s a very good reason to believe the GOP would want Biden to remain: he’s a quite unpopular president for whom the overwhelming majority of Americans have concerns about his age and mental fitness. Further, he has a ton of political baggage, and is highly contentious amongst Democrats.

Personally, I genuinely think Gretchen Whitmer (with Pete Buttigieg as running mate) would be much more likely to win in November, at least according to post-debate polling from this leaked internal memo: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Leaked internal memo with post-debate polling data showing a strong preference for Biden alternatives (especially Whitmer and Buttigieg) in key swing states: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless while maintaining or increasing productivity and providing a suite of additional benefits. Livestock continue to emit the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, but these are more than offset by carbon sequestration, at least until soil carbon saturation is achieved.

Silvopasture also offer financial benefits for farmers and ranchers. Livestock, trees, and other forest products, such as nuts, fruit, and mushrooms, generate income on different time horizons. And help protect farmers from risk. The health and productivity of both animals and the land improve.

https://drawdown.org/solutions/silvopasture

Trees in silvopasture systems provide livestock with protection from sun and wind, which can increase animal comfort and improve production. Trees can provide shade in the summer and windbreaks in the winter, allowing livestock to moderate their own temperature. Heat stress in livestock has been associated with decreased feed intake, increased water intake, and negative effects on production, reproductive health, milk yields, fitness, and longevity.[4][5]

Certain tree types can also serve as fodder for livestock. Trees may produce fruit or nuts that can be eaten by livestock while still on the tree or after they have fallen. The leaves of trees may serve as forage as well, and silvopasture managers can utilize trees as forage by felling the tree so that it can be eaten by livestock, or by using coppicing or pollarding to encourage leaf growth where it is accessible to livestock.[1]

Well-managed silvopasture systems can produce as much forage as open-pasture systems under favorable circumstances. Silvopasture systems have also been observed to produce forage of higher nutritive quality than non-silvopasture forage under certain conditions. Increased forage availability has been observed in silvopasture systems compared to open-pasture systems under drought conditions, where the combination of shade from trees and water uptake from tree roots may reduce drought impacts.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

Exactly. I’ve seen it with faaaaaar too many tankies and even populist leftists. Instead of advocating for empirically-driven policy that would measurably improve the world, there’s a ton of rhetoric about how we just need to punish capitalists/fascists/landlords/neolibs/billionaires/etc. harder to fix the world’s problems.

At this point, I think it’s just a deep-rooted flaw of the human psyche that we’re just inclined towards trying to force our solutions through by punishing those who oppose us, rather than trying to deeply understand the dynamics at play and changing the underlying structure to incentivize the outcomes we want.

And if we fail to address the tendency towards knee-jerk, brute-force, authoritarian “solutions” to problems within our own ranks, we’ll meet the same fate as every other revolution-turned-brutal-dictatorship.

The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.

It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

When Milwaukee implemented a housing-first homeless policy, they actually saved money.

Turns out that, by almost completely eliminating homelessness, you can save a lot of money on the legal system, policing, healthcare, and other costs associated with homelessness.

Housing-first homeless policy is the obvious solution: it’s humane, it’s effective, and it saves us money.

NYC itself doesn’t have much (although it still has some! see image below) low-density zoning, but their suburbs sure do. The city itself also has a lot of other bureaucratic barriers to development that result in it having abysmal housing construction rates.

As for vacancy, yes, the threat of not being able to sell is what stops builders from building too much. For example, it’s the reason no one’s even trying to build the Burj Khalifa in Bakersfield. But if you make it legal and reasonably easy to build, yes, people will build.

Perhaps Tokyo is the best example. Biggest city in the world, and yet it’s actually relatively affordable, thanks largely to good land use policy:

In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.

…

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

I think the key idea is to not have government bureaucrats or existing homeowners or landlords decide whether there’s “enough” housing, but rather let builders determine if there’s unmet demand. If there is unmet demand, they will build if you let them. If there truly is enough housing in a certain city, then you don’t need to tell builders not to build – they’ll simply stop building if they sense there’s not enough demand for it.

The “we have enough homes already” is a common (and unfortunately very harmful) myth.

A couple good in-depth videos on the topic:

• https://youtu.be/evYOhpjMql0?si=IRUAo9RxDjZVenpI
• https://youtu.be/3xZXdXxYBGU?si=DF-MesH6FIetbur-

The gist of it is that statistics on how many vacant homes exist are highly misleading, for two main reasons:

1. Many of the homes are not where the demand is. A vacant home in St Louis does nothing to help with a housing shortage in NYC. People want to live in NYC because that’s where the jobs are. A house in St Louis isn’t worth much if you can’t find work there. And statistics consistently show that the most expensive cities have the lowest vacancy rates.
2. A lot of the homes that are counted as “vacant” aren’t actually just free for the taking like “vacant” would have you believe. In these statistics, “vacant” can mean: 1) a unit that is between tenants, 2) a unit that just finished being built and is awaiting its tenant’s move-in, 3) a unit occupied by someone who doesn’t legally state it as their primary residence (e.g., student housing where the student still lists their parents’ home as their primary address), 4) a unit in horrible disrepair that is unfit for occupation, etc.

Add to this the fact that high vacancy rates are GOOD for you, as it means landlords and sellers have a credible threat of vacancy, meaning they can’t demand ludicrous prices. Reducing vacancy rates is an incredibly anti-consumer, pro-landlord move.

Yeah, political opinions based on “regulations always good” or “regulations always bad” are lazy and unhelpful. For one, it ignores that many regulations are written for the express purpose of manufacturing or solidifying a monopoly.

Regulatory capture

And NIMBY land use policies really are just a textbook example of regulatory capture. Homeowners, who expect their homes to perpetually increase in value, lobby their local governments to manufacture an artificial scarcity of housing so as to drive their property values to the moon. All of this at the expense of renters and new home buyers.

Imo, we should all be trying to form nuanced political opinions where we judge policy on whether it’s good policy or not.

Honestly, I care far more about untangling our rat’s nest of NIMBY land use laws. As it stands, it’s literally illegal to build anything denser than sprawling, low-density suburbs on the majority of urban land thanks to NIMBY policies such as restrictive zoning and arbitrary mandatory parking minimums.

Tbh, the whole “corporate ownership of homes” is a red herring. Shuffling around ownership does nothing if you’re not massively expanding supply. And what we need most right now is massively expanded supply.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

I’m personally in favor of land value taxes, externality taxes, and natural resource severance taxes.

Me, too. I haaaaaate mint toothpaste.

Just discovered coconut ginger toothpaste a little over a year ago. I’m sticking with this toothpaste for life.

From wikipedia:

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and right‐wing factions as well.[5][6]

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[7][8]

By extension, the term is used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[9][10] Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of illiberal or authoritarian states with a socialist legacy or a nominally left-wing government, such as the Republic of Belarus, People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Additionally, tankies are said to have a tendency to support non-socialist states with no socialist legacy if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general, regardless of their ideology,[4][11] such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

There are a number of progressive and/or leftist and/or communist but explicitly anti-tankie communities out there, including !196 and !tankiejerk (as well as r/196 and r/tankiejerk back on reddit).

As for whether this guy was a tankie, idk. I’d have to read up on him further.