Rent control has bad effects, but politically, when a city gentrifies, this can cause rents to raise so fast as to effectively be an eviction. Gentrification is good for creating flourishing urban areas, but it is unfair to the tenants already living there and could lead to political demands to stop the gentrification.
A rent control that slows the raising of rents, gives the current tenants more time until they can’t afford rent, and gives them more time to make more money, while allowing inflation-based rent raises and letting landlords charge market prices to new tenants…may be a net good.
Multi-year rent freezes that allow no rent increases are bad.
China’s covert ops are penetrating many countries, including the United States. Fifty percent of US counterspy efforts are against China. China likes to threaten Chinese living in the US to help their operations, if they don’t obey, the CCP will harm their family members still in China.
The CCP is threatened by American military power, but it’s most threatened by free expression and free peoples and that the Chinese people will demand more freedom and say in government, and the CCP fears what this will mean for their control of the country.
The Houthis aren’t simply an ethnic nationalist group, they are Islamist who want to conquer all Yemen and indoctrinate people into their theocracy. They are brutal and oppressive to the people they conquer.
If the world wants to defeat the Houthis, they need to diligently train a Yemeni force, support it with air power, and see the war through to the end.
China hasn’t simply over invested in their property sector, their credit system is politically biased to invest in unproductive assets, their consumption seems hopelessly suppressed, making China dependent on exports, and all of their amazing new technology is not enough to overcome their malinvestment.
Abdul El Sayed is either so biased on the Israel-Palestine issues that he can’t think clearly about it…or he is bullshitting in this interview.
He thinks we should use words because of the moral imperative they cause not because of the actual meanings of the words!!!
He said that as an official leader in the US government, the lives of Jews are equally as important as the lives of Palestinian Palestinians. On some higher level, all lives are equal, but the leaders of the US should prioritize the lives of Americans and not consider them equal.
His claim that Israel is systematically annihilating tens of thousands of kids is ridiculously misleading! They are systematically trying to kill terrorists who don’t fight in the open, forcing Israel to either just let enemies plan and build up, or to accept killing kids as a cost to fighting terrorists using human shields.
His appeal to authority is bullshit. Things generally get complicated legally, but the word genocide is not that complicated! It’s an attempt to destroy a people. Given Israel’s power to wipe out and kill almost ever Gazan, does it look like Israel is trying to systematically kill every Gazan? The answer is no! It looks like they are fighting a terrorist organization determined to destroy their country that hides amongst civilians and that Israel is open to a lot of collateral damage and at times is committing war crimes.
His answer did seem to imply that he doesn’t think it is an actual genocide. Either he doesn’t think that and is lying when he uses the word, or he gave a bullshit answer in this interview because he thought it would come off better than getting into an argument about what genocide actually means.
Trump’s trade wars on our allies, his threats to take territory from allies, and his threats to end Canada’s existence as an independent country…have caused the world to turn away from the US economically and diplomatically. Losing economic cooperation and trade that otherwise would have happened won’t single-handedly cause a US recession, but is hurting Americans economically and will continue to do so. We’d be better off without all of this bullshit. Hopefully future administrations can limit the extent that countries wire trade and cooperation away from the US.
US advisors and special forces have been involved in Yemen since Obama-times, fighting Al Qaeda terrorists, then also the Houthis. These missions killed some terrorists, but Yemen remains a major problem with no long-term solution in sight.
The Trump-Xi meeting didn’t change much, if anything important, but it does keep the conversation open, and, maybe more technical people can work something more substantial out.
A president meeting a foreign leader at the airport is rare and is a sign of deference and weakness. Xi stood at the top of his airplane steps, while Trump waited at the bottom like a subservient vassal. Probably doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things, but goes along with Trump’s flooding dictators with love and praise while repeatedly violating the rule of law himself.
Despite Trump’s public subservience to China and its leader, and despite backing down at his attempts of major trade war against China, the Trump administration is still pushing back against China in smaller, yet important, and less headline grabbing, ways.
Maybe we’ve reached the end of history in the sense that domestic and international conflict is no longer about major differences in worldview, like Republicanism VS monarchy, or Communism VS Capitalism/Democracy, but relatively small ideological differences and a focus on: first-world middle class people making their lives relatively better, groups who haven’t done as well getting butthurt about their relative status, and great power contests more about territory, power, and security dilemmas than ideological differences.