Biden Calls for Antitrust Laws To Rein in Big Tech (theverge.com) 136
In his first State of the Union address since Republicans took a slim House majority, President Joe Biden called on Congress to take up an issue over which there's growing bipartisan momentum but powerful obstacles that stand in the way: strengthening American antitrust law to crack down on Big Tech's monopoly power. From a report: "Pass the bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage," Biden told lawmakers on Tuesday evening, referring to the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). "Capitalism without competition is not capitalism," he added. "It's extortion. It's exploitation."
Biden's renewed push comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last year effectively killed two bipartisan antitrust bills aimed at cracking down on platform monopolies. While saying he supported the measures and promising a vote on them for months, the New York Democrat never brought the package to the floor, even after the White House urged congressional leadership to send the bills to Biden's desk during the lame duck session after the midterm elections. Schumer insisted the bills didn't have the votes needed to pass, contradicting the chief architects of the legislation, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican of Iowa. Grassley told TIME last fall that more than 20 Republicans were prepared to vote for the package.
Biden's renewed push comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last year effectively killed two bipartisan antitrust bills aimed at cracking down on platform monopolies. While saying he supported the measures and promising a vote on them for months, the New York Democrat never brought the package to the floor, even after the White House urged congressional leadership to send the bills to Biden's desk during the lame duck session after the midterm elections. Schumer insisted the bills didn't have the votes needed to pass, contradicting the chief architects of the legislation, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican of Iowa. Grassley told TIME last fall that more than 20 Republicans were prepared to vote for the package.
Capitalism without competition is not capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
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False. No competition is the single stable state of the system known as capitalism which is typified by private control and reliance of a free market economy.
Ironically though the stable state is also referred to a condition of "market failure" meaning that the singular goal of capitalism is itself to fail.
At least according to economic textbooks.
The reality is no true free market exists because noone other than profit hungry corporations want that.
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Capitalism isn't a state, it is a process, and one at a polar end to true communism. And it requires a regulated market to prevent the reliance on a single company or group of companies. The world's economy changes, get use to it. So market regulation must also continually change. So, nice straw man you have constructed there for yourself.
Re:Capitalism without competition is not capitalis (Score:4, Funny)
Interesting FP branch and the story is fresh enough to merit a comment. (Stale stores are for possible Funny, though there's so little of that these years...)
To paraphrase the Gandhi joke:
"What do you think of capitalism?"
"Sounds like a nice idea. When are they going to try it?"
Not like we've gotten anywhere close, but I think it's the rules of the game that matter, and right now the rules are crazy broken.
So the solution approach I'd favor (and which I'm certain is nowhere near Biden's politically limited thinking on this topic) would be to tweak the tax system to favor freedom and discourage mindless greed. Imagine (if you can) a progressive tax on profits linked to market share. Then the royal road to higher retained earnings would call for reproducing your market-dominating company with amoeba-like division into smaller competing companies.
(And I bet you couldn't.)
Or in the form of a recent Mastodon [elephant sound?] comment:
In theory, #democracy in a #republic means each person should get equal consideration of any good ideas that help everyone.
In practice, the only ideas that get considered by the "elected" representatives are those coming from selfish rich folks who are most clever in bribing the politicians. Even more shocking, it turns out most of those "good" ideas are about ways to make themselves richer.
Job creators in a flying pig's eye. Just cunning money grubbers treating other people like grubs.
Cablecos (Score:1)
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Slightly disagree. An auction is the truest form of free markets. Here's a product. How much will you pay for it? In this one case, the free market determines the final price, not the company/seller.
You might think you have something worth $100, but to the people bidding it's only worth $10.
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"You might think you have something worth $100, but to the people bidding it's only worth $10"
Further up the chain, someone mentioned cable companies having to sell access to competitors.
How will that work with auctions, if the incumbents can set reserve pricing that the "people bidding" don't think is good value?
Re: Capitalism without competition is not capitali (Score:2)
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Similarly, you can starve to death to protest food prices, or die of dehydration to protest water prices, etc.
Sometimes it isn't as easy as you're making it out to be.
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You can bid $0 dollars and not buy it. Enough people do that and the pricing changes.
No, it won't.
The cable companies want to keep their infrastructure private. If they get to set the price & you don't pay, you get nothing & they keep everything.
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True, to some extent, but that is the way auctions work. Not everyone can afford everything, but those that can are free to pay whatever price they want.
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Capitalism is an ism. Almost most words that end in ism, means it is an ideology.
Ideology is a poor replacement for a proper implementation. While a good ideology is easier to implement well, while a bad ideology tends to be more difficult to have a good implementation. The ideology in itself isn't good or bad. If people are willing to put in the extra work to make a bad ideology work well and just then it will be better than a good ideology that was put together like crap.
Capitalism in general is a goo
You all voted for partisan bickering (Score:3)
This is the result of decades of voting for "the lesser of two evils."
It's become so bad now that "Team Red" and "Team Blue" can't ever be seen to work together.
The real tragedy is that they have become such a powerful duopoly that other choices are no longer available.
This will not end well.
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This is the result of decades of voting for "the lesser of two evils."
It's become so bad now that "Team Red" and "Team Blue" can't ever be seen to work together.
The real tragedy is that they have become such a powerful duopoly that other choices are no longer available.
This will not end well.
You guys really need some sort of "I a Democrat supporter do promise to vote third party instead of dems, if you, a Republican supporter promise to vote third party too" kind of matchmaking scheme. Though I do wonder if trust and honor are enough to sustain this scheme. After all, we all know that supporters of [the other party] are lying bastards.
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Unfortunately, the average American is unable to comprehend much beyond "my team good, other team bad."
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When I was young, that's how I handled the top of the ballot, but for the rest of the races I tended to go for the person who sounded least represented. Just the name is often enough for that one, and the party tag could be ignored. At the top of the ticket, it was too often a "least bad" choice.
However things changed over the years, and these days I think the only hope is for the dissolution of one party, so at that point the question became "Which party deserves to die and get replaced?" Looking at recent
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...I think the only hope is for the dissolution of one party...
Fortunately there is only one Party.
It has the two factions I like to call "Team Red" and "Team Blue."
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Bogus and defeatist. There are real differences, but it is unfortunate that the system basically hard-coded into the Constitution encourages, even forces, so much concurrence. If a page-one rewrite were allowed, I'm sure I could create an entirely new bunch of problems.
We don't live in a perfect word. Get over it.
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Ranked choice could be interesting, but good luck getting the self-centered elite pricks in office to ever allow that change to happen at the national level. They know it'd be certain doom for the same-ol', same-ol' lesser of two evils schtick to keep working, so they'll never let it happen.
They've done a good enough job of keeping the public entertained with their supposed public fights that the public will never build trust between the two parties themselves. Granted, I think 99.99% of the bullshit public
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ranked choice is a horrid system for selecting leadership over the long term.
It almost universally negative arguments rather than positive policy proposals to put the voters. Winning becomes more about convincing people to put the presumptive front runner somewhere other than the #1 spot then anything else. You think we have whip-saw policy now...
Rank-choice would almost certainly lead to a whole new level of dysfunction. Either we will still have the two party legacy but see the government mostly change
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It almost universally negative arguments rather than positive policy proposals to put the voters. Winning becomes more about convincing people to put the presumptive front runner somewhere other than the #1 spot then anything else. You think we have whip-saw policy now...
Have you got examples of this happening, I don't know of may places that implement this on a national level, there are city councils I know of that do this and it seems fine.
What I do know is the current system is not working, it doesn't allow change from the current 2 parties and needs to change.
Will there be dysfunction with ranked voting? Most probably. The question is will it be more than the current system? My answer is I don't know. But I believe the current system is so broken that we need to at leas
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Re:You all voted for partisan bickering (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, rolling out RCV would require that very same two party system to vote against its own interests.
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Sounds like vote swapping and its a crime
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No it's not enough to sustain that. I like the idea, but when we have members of a party re-registering to the opposing party so they can vote in the Primary elections for a candidate that they want their *actual* party choice to beat, it's F'd up.
Both have had major media players encourage the "strategy".
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The idea that you get to rank your choices and if your first choice doesn't get in then the second counts and so on, that would allow people to vote for who they want as opposed to stopping the people who they least want getting in, aka the largest opposing party. But since this idea would likely break up the 2 party system it probably will not happen.
I also like the idea of voting for no one, that is explicitly state that you believe none of the candidates/parties are able to run the country. I don't quite
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The system is designed around "partisan bickering", it is an intentional features. The various branches of the government are supposed to be at each others throats all the time. "Gridlock" is a benefit - it assures that only those laws with broad support are passed. The intent was to minimize the ability of the government to "rule". If they are busy arguing with each other, they aren't creating a ruling class, which was what the founding fathers were trying to avoid.
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This assumes that passing laws with broad support is a benefit, but that's just an example of the bandwagon fallacy.
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Except it's become dysfunctional now that the two factions are operating with two different sets of facts, and only one of them based on reality.
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It's become so bad now that "Team Red" and "Team Blue" can't ever be seen to work together.
This can actually be considered a feature, if you don't agree with the agendas of either parties. Musk tweeted [twitter.com] a statement along those lines prior to the mid-term elections (though he's hardly the first person to suggest this).
It also doesn't always work, because sometimes, as the saying goes, both parties will agree to do something which is both evil and stupid and then call it bipartisan.
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It's become so bad now that "Team Red" and "Team Blue" can't ever be seen to work together.
Part of the problem, I think, is that it has been clear for decades to all the little groups with their own agendas that they're not going to have a chance in hell of getting anything they want passed unless they're part of the Big Two political parties, so they join whichever party whose principles they have to hold their noses least over. As a result, instead of their being mostly monolithic organizations with a single primary ideology, the Big Two have become fragmented collections of special interests w
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This will not end well.
Don't care it just needs to end.
TikTok (Score:5, Insightful)
TikTok is gobbling up profits from Facebook and Twitter. Congress' response is to try to ban TikTok.
Who needs market monopoly power when government does your dirty work for you?
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Never mind it is also sending immense amounts of data to the Chinese Communist Party to be mined for whatever might be found..
You might have had a decent protectionist argument (wrong, just like the EU, but arguable) in another example. Clearly, TikTok is a special case.
Reasoning (Score:2)
Never mind it is also sending immense amounts of data to the Chinese Communist Party to be mined for whatever might be found..
If that is the primary reason for banning TikTok, we'd also be banning Alibaba, and WeChat, and the dozens of MMORPGs that Tencent or Outblaze owns, or Eufy, or DJI...
Nope it's just TikTok for some reason.
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Who says we shouldn't block or ban that in a lot of situations? That there are also *other* potential paths doesn't mean you ignore TikTok.
Do big tech actually collude? (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as everyone talks about "Big Tech", they compete with each other *fierecely*, to such a degree that it seems impossible for one to enter a market without another following.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and to a lesser extent Disney and Warner/Discovery, are all bitter competitors. I don't see any of them doing price fixing or influencing markets. Google does command a large share of advertising, yes.. but so does Facebook. And good luck advertising on the #1 retail web property (Amazon), they don't even allow you do. Meanwhile, Amazon competes fiercely as well with Walmart, Target, Best Buy.
Like, I honestly don't see the issue.
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As much as everyone talks about "Big Tech", they compete with each other *fierecely*, to such a degree that it seems impossible for one to enter a market without another following.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and to a lesser extent Disney and Warner/Discovery, are all bitter competitors.
Like, I honestly don't see the issue.
By the same token McDonalds, Nike and the Acme toothpick company are also "bitter competitors".
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they compete with each other *fierecely*
Yes and you managed to name all five of them. This is what we call an oligopoly and is no better for the wider market than a monopoly. They actively stamp out competition and present huge barriers to entry into a market. Better still they don't even compete with each other in the same market in many of their product segments.
By the way collusion is just one small tiny piece of the larger thing that is "antitrust laws".
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Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and to a lesser extent Disney and Warner/Discovery, are all bitter competitors.
Like, I honestly don't see the issue.
They are competitors for advertising dollars. Their products are NOT in competition. I will just hop on over to Disney to connect with my former classmates and buy a computer. I will hop on over to Google to watch Marvel super hero movies and have them send me some digital books from Tom Clancy.
You still don't see a problem?
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Nothing has. Everything is staying the same quality while going up in price.
Not just big tech (Score:5, Interesting)
So the Biden administration is jumping on the bandwagon started by the EU. Both are missing the problem. It's not "big tech". The problem is "big anything".
Capitalism is the best economic system ever invented, but it only works as long as competition is genuinely possible. The only way to ensure that is through government regulation. Remember 2008 and "too big to fail"? That was a failure of government regulation, because *no* business should ever be too big to fail. Also, big companies can litigate little companies to death, or buy them up, or destroy them in many other ways.
The solution is to set a simple, objective threshold to prevent companies from getting too large. Any company worth more than X cannot be involved in M&A. It can only grow organically. Any company worth more than some multiple of X must divest, or else be forcefully broken up.
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And what would be an objective amount for 'X'? The value of a company is generally measured in market value, but that's a highly volatile measure that has more to do with investor's belief in a company, not necessarily their 'size'.
Different industries have far different capital requirements, and different market values. There is nothing simple about trying to create a legal maximum size for businesses.
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I disagree. This doesn't have to be set in stone, never to be changed. Pick something and have a plan to revisit and revise.
No business can have more than 20% market share in its industry. A business' market share is defined as it's total annual gross revenue across all its business units in all industries. Every 5 years the FTC shall revisit this market share limit to assess whether or not it has met the goals of enhancing competition within the US economy, and shall adjust it by no more than 5% in either direction should market changes demand it.
I think the mistake of most people planning action in any area, but especially in politics, is not setting out clear goals and reasons for the action, and not setting up a system to monitor and revise the action if it's not meeting the intended goals.
Re:Not just big tech (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about 2008 that nobody really talks about is the fact that the public, and the government, refused to learn anything from it. "Too big to fail" should have set off alarm bells across the spectrum, but aside from some talking heads spouting some nonsense and a few of the usual middle-class folks whining about big money movers getting bailed out while they got shoved around when they fucked up monetarily, no lesson appeared to have been learned. Or the only lesson learned was big business realizing they could literally do anything they wanted, and if they failed the government would step in and hand them tax dollars to save them.
The worst part of the whole thing is not getting any stake in said companies for the money they were given. That's the very least that should have happened, but as far as any of us heard, it didn't.
There SHOULD be a break-up of the biggest companies in the economy. I won't pretend to know what the threshold should be for looking at breaking a company, but I know for certain that there are several worth enough to be worth a serious regulatory look. Does Google need to make more money by scraping data? Do the hugest investment firms need to grow still larger, so they can devastate the economy more fully when they fail next time? Does Disney really need to own 75% or more of the entire entertainment sphere in America? None of these things seem healthy for society as a whole, yet our politicians turn a blind eye to it until the problem becomes so big that they HAVE to pay attention. And somehow, when that happens, our politicians decide the solution is to save the companies without any further thought being put into it.
With as corrupt as our entire government is, I don't see that being fixed in my lifetime. There's just too much money changing hands in such a way that no business worth the billions or trillions of dollars some of these juggernauts have will ever get real scrutiny from the government. There's the big speeches, like Biden's, where they get called out. Some money will magically appear in Biden's campaign funds and suddenly this won't be that big of a problem again. It'll just silently go away. Much like his and Obama's promises of lowering healthcare costs for the general public. They've raised costs to the point where a lot of us can no longer afford insurance on a regular basis, let alone entertain having any sort of procedure, most of which aren't covered by insurance even if you have it.
Our entire government is broken. They don't work for the people. They work for the bigger businesses and multi-billionaires that want nothing more than to strip what's left of the middle class to continue to build their wealth. I don't know that I see any hope of real change in my life. I made the mistake of believing in that possibility once. Blabbing some great talk without actual action won't make me stupid enough to trust in that hope again.
Bribeocracy (Score:4, Insightful)
> Our entire government is broken. They don't work for the people. They work for the bigger businesses and multi-billionaires
We have to take money out of politics, but the big & wealthy buy laws and law removals that help them get even more influence. "Slippery slope" is generally considered a fallacy without further evidence of slippage, but slippery slopes can and do happen, and the wealthy are getting ever more power and using that power to get even more.
The "Citizens United" ruling more or less legalized political bribery by labelling it "free speech". There's no evidence most forefathers wanted corporations to have the same rights as people, but GOP-stacked courts keep pushing for "corporate personhood" because the rich donate lots of money to law-makers who push it.
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They should be treated with distrust and suspicion. They are evils to barely tolerate until we find something else.
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I agree with your general concept, but when I hear "regulation" I think of a large bureaucracy devoted to figuring out and applying complex rules. I prefer an easier solution. Use the tax system. Specifically, make income taxes for companies more like income taxes for individuals.
First change would be to make corporate income taxes be based on revenue not profit. Except for a few things that are tax deducible, my personal income taxes don't change based on what I spend in the year. But just about every
Forget big tech, the telcos are worse (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to look at an example of abuse of monopoly power, look at the likes of Comcast, AT&T and the other big telcos where they think nothing of spending huge sums of money to keep anything even vaguely resembling competitors out. (getting laws in passed in a number of states that restrict competitors, lobbying at the local level to prevent new entrants from being able to build infrastructure and generally fighting against anything that would force them to actually compete)
Now we know where the money flows (Score:2)
Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Democrat President and it doesn't even go up for a vote.
A vote will confirm that, or they will pass. Simples. Unless there's a rea$on not to have a vote.
Wealth of nations (Score:2)
"Capitalism without competition is not capitalism ..."
When "Causes of the wealth of nations" was written, everyday services were fungible: If one didn't approve of the local butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker, an alternative was available on the other side of town. Now, Android OS and Apple hardware exists in nearly every country, a local alternative doesn't exist. It's not better at the international scale: Samsung decided to drop their own mobile operating system (Tizen for phones) and compete against the Google ecosystem, by using the Google Android O
Re:I'm less worried about Big Tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you only have one fuck to give? There are 535 members of congress, we should expect them to work on multiple problems at once.
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Congress? Work? In the same sentence, yet!
And you think this Congress can solve any problem? You're killing me!
Mod parent super-funny.
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A lot of people are of the mistaken belief that congress serves the people who elect them, to solve the problems the politicians claim congress can fix.
At its best, congress is inert, and at its worst makes more problems that "only congress" can solve.
And it doesn't matter if you are D or R, you think your side in congress is going to fix things. And it rarely if ever does.
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No Congress can solve problems, since their ability to get reelected depends on having problems that only they can solve.
You want Congress to solve problems, impose term limits on Congress. One term and you're done for life might work.
Face it, as long as a Congress has control of multiple trillions of dollars, being a Congress-critter will be about buying congress-critters to get your piece of the pie.
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You want Congress to solve problems, impose term limits on Congress. One term and you're done for life might work.
I think that eliminating term limits and replacing them with a prohibition on running for, being elected to, or being appointed to any elected office during the normal term of office of an elected office you were elected or appointed to might work better. You're elected or appointed to a Senatorial seat, and during its term of office, all you have to concern you is being a Senator; you've got no concerns about being re-elected, because you will leave office at the end of your term, and quitting midterm does
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No Congress can solve problems, since their ability to get reelected depends on having problems that only they can solve.
You want Congress to solve problems, impose term limits on Congress. One term and you're done for life might work.
Face it, as long as a Congress has control of multiple trillions of dollars, being a Congress-critter will be about buying congress-critters to get your piece of the pie.
It would also make them want to do as much as possible in a shorter time to have a lasting legacy. It would reduce the "I'll fix it later" mentality.
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Back to calls for the page-one rewrite of the Constitution, eh?
I feel like going radical on that one. How about a no-loser guaranteed-exactly-equal-representation voting system?
Computers could be used for good purposes rather than ever-more-clever gerrymandering.
Re:I'm less worried about Big Tech (Score:5, Funny)
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Um, sorry, in 1929, they limited the number of members of Congress to 435.
Re:I'm less worried about Big Tech (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, they limited the size of the House of Representatives to 435. That plus 100 senators makes up 535, the number of people in the US Congress(which comprises the House and the Senate).
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There are 535 members of congress, we should expect them to work on multiple problems at once.
You seem to be under a misapprehension about who they work for.
Here's a hint: It's the people who pay them.
Re:I listed 3 things (Score:4, Insightful)
Biden want to get tech to crack down on fake news and Russian propaganda
And factual information on subjects like Covid, climate change and green energy. Narratives need to be upheld. We can't have people undermining them with pesky things like contradictory factual information.
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Biden is only going to make progress in areas where there is some agreement between the parties, and wanting to limit Big Tech qualifies. The others you mention are far less likely to get traction with this Congress.
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"how come I can't get a $1200/mo mortgage but I'm supposed to afford $2000 in rent?".
Doesn't the fact they have to ask tell us all we need to know about their relative ability and grasp of how anything works?
The answer is simple, with credit to buy much of the risk lies with the lender if/when you can't pay. With rent, the risk lies with the renter, the owner has the asset and the asset structure they chose, the renter is turned out..
Force once though i partly agree with you rsilvergun, this is a big problem. Ultimately short term (15 year) fluctuations aside rent though reflects the value
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Actually having sold some property lately I found that a big part of the problem is China. Asking around real estate agents and others confirmed a similar experience.
When anyone lists a house, China was right there waiting to swoop in and bid whatever it takes with no closing period. My theory is they are converting some of those dollars they've bought up in the past into US real estate.
Ok, little freaked out by that last bit (Score:2)
Also legalize drugs and end the drug war. Do that and those countries will stabilize, modernize and stop sending us their excess population.
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notice how nobody worries about Canadian hosers overrunning the country in caravans?
I just imagine there's a big "Welcome to the USA - We don't have socialized healthcare!" sign at the border and that does the job.
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I know an owner maintains property and risk, but it is still a bad situation.
I'm not even sure we should allow apartments to exist the way we currently do. I'd like to explore the idea that any long-term rental gets an equity option after some period. Why do we allow institutional investors the ability to profit wildly off land?
I don't think immigrants are the problem. We have space. We have the ability to build when we want to. We need to create disincentives or prohibitions on large scale real estate spec
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Super-low interest rates ironically make housing less affordable. It was the cause of the massive runup in home prices. Keeping interest rates at a more reasonable 5-6% actually preserves home affordability. And at the same time, significantly reduces the incentive for large scale investor speculation. It's a lot harder to buy/flip homes or buy up a bunch of them for rentals when you can't leverage them for only 2-3% interest rates.
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My "big gubmit" hat says we should ban institutional single-family real estate investment.
I don't see how housing prices get so run up with low-interest loans. Or, I do, but why is it worse that money goes to the seller of the house than going to the banks for the privilege of the loan? My recollection of the banking crisis of 08 was banks getting stupid about loaning to people with variable APRs loans they couldn't afford, and being able to repackage those loans to rubes until it all crumbled.
Low-interest
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Native Americans emigrated from Mongolia
Re: I'm less worried about Big Tech (Score:2)
No, we came from venus after we wrecked it
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Because prior to that immigration, all those white people had no crime or problems.
Reminds me of when I hear people talk about immigrants and rape. "Did you know 20% of all rapes are committed by immigrants?"
So what you're saying is 80% of all rapes are committed by citizens. Maybe you should work on that part first.
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"Reminds me of when I hear people talk about immigrants and rape. "Did you know 20% of all rapes are committed by immigrants?"
So what you're saying is 80% of all rapes are committed by citizens. Maybe you should work on that part first."
You aren't so great at math are you? 336,030,943 people in the US, Estimated 11.5 M illegal immigrants. So they are only ~3.44% of the population but according to your numbers commit 20% of the rapes. Whereas the the other 96.5% of the population only commit 80%. See the pro
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As a follow up, when all those white Irish immigrated to this country, they brought crime and problems with them as well. So did those white Italians. Ever hear of the mafia?
And let's not get into the crime and problems brought in by white folks from Eastern Europe.
Re:I'm less worried about Big Tech (Score:4, Informative)
"As a follow up, when all those white Irish immigrated to this country, they brought crime and problems with them as well. So did those white Italians. Ever hear of the mafia?
And let's not get into the crime and problems brought in by white folks from Eastern Europe."
Well gee Wally... If only I'd mentioned something about all that. Oh yeah... I DID. To quote me, "When the US encouraged mass largely unrestricted immigration we had loads of land and a very low population. That immigration brought tons of crime and problems with it as well despite people loving to look back with rose tinted glasses."
The Irish in particular did a great job of turning it around though by pursuing public office and law enforcement. Those aren't the only ones though. The Chinese immigrants also brought organized crime with them and so did many of the other groups to varying degrees. See the difference between us that you are a racist see the issue through a lens of color. As usual color is irrelevant, the larger the common origin and concentrated settlement of immigrants the stronger the organized crime element among them historically.
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Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and Florida have all made enormous gains in population from 2020 onwards. Illinois, California and NY have been losing population. Your comment was not nearly as witty as you thought it would be.
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Mississippi and most of the rest of the South rely almost entirely on handouts from New York and California, so hopefully they won't fall over too badly.
You're American, so you've never travelled, but I can tell you that vast areas of your country are unbelievably poor and as an outsider it shocked me how badly the average American lives.
But go on, tell me all about how the progressives mak
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Yet immigrants from all over the world are clamoring to get into our "shithole country", legally or even illegally if necessary. Why could that be?
As for progressives making places worse, there's no better example than the most progressive city in the country, San Francisco. Look how awesome they made it! Seattle and Portland are honorable mentions.
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I've just been reading about how that weird DeSantis guy keeps passing laws stopping teachers from teaching things he doesn't like because of how it makes him feel. I don't think he identifies as progressive though.
He's the guy who sent armed police to arrest a scientist because she said some things that hurt his feelings.
Tell me again all about how bad the progressives are.
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whatabout whatabout whatabout whatabout whatabout
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I haven't been a renter in some time, but I also know there is no way that $2000 rent is the bottom of the market, unless you're in New York City or the Bay Area. $2000/mo would be pretty far up the scale of luxury apartments anywhere that real estate isn't in a massively inflated bubble.
More than that, if nobody can afford the $2000/mo rent, then the place is empty and the owner is making nothing, but probably still paying on a loan of some kind. That will cause downward pressure on rents, because getti
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"$2000/mo would be pretty far up the scale of luxury apartments anywhere that real estate isn't in a massively inflated bubble."
The national media rent -- NATIONAL -- is around $2,000.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/09... [npr.org]
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Because I was curious, I started looking around in the city I live in (Portland, OR) which has one of the most inflated markets around due to the restrictive nature of land use laws. $2000/mo gets you a luxury apartment in the middle of downtown, with a balcony looking at the river with Mt. Hood in the background in the Portland Astoria.
Using Zillow and doing a search for anything with a maximum of $1000/mo rent still brings up 35+ results within Portland, and that's not even counting the other cities in t
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$1200 will get you a fucking yurt in Humboldt.
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"That median figure seems to not line up with observable reality, or is very skewed to the expensive side due to oversampling excessively expensive cities to live in."
Your observations are skewed by looking at smaller cities, probably. NYC has more than 20 times the population of Portland and 2,000 will get you nothing. Cincinnati is about half the population of even Portland.
When looking at the experience of people in this country, weighting tiny cities with large cities skews your results dramatically.
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So again, sampling NYC and SF equally to other cities is going to drag the median to the expensive side, which is exactly what I said. So thanks for agreeing with me.
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You sample cities in proportion to their percentage of population. So no, you sample NYC and SF more than you sample Portland if you want to get an accurate version of the lived experience of Americans.
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We either need to be given what was promised by our forefathers or we stop lying to our children.
"Sorry Little Timmy. You don't fucking matter. You either accept this corporate slave training or its a bullet to the back of your head."