A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.

On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.

Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.

Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.

A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.

But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.

No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:

1. Flippers
2. Landlords-as-a-business.

1) Flippers

The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:

1. Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
2. Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.

Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.

And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.

So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.

A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.

Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.

But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.

This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.

2) Landlords-as-a-business

The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:

1. It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
2. Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.

As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.

• Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
• Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.

By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.

Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:

Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.

By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.

Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.

Wow. When a church tells the GOP to fark off, that’s gotta be a bad situation. Most churches are deep into the ChristoFascist end of the political spectrum, so McCormick must have pissed off Rev. Edward’s something bad.

And why couldn’t they have done that to the student loans system?

Like JFC, they could have instantly made themselves immune from trial-by-jury anywhere in America by doing that one tiny thing.

The FBI is probably going nuts here because someone inadvertently archived the Epstein files and everyone at HQ is panicking. They need to purge it for the Internet before someone discovers that archived content, and so they’re using CP as an excuse.

With homelessness exploding due to how the asset-owning Parasite Class is jacking rents into the stratosphere, why is any residential property vacant at this time?

Vacant residential properties should be taxed out the nose - well above any rent or price appreciation - until they are occupied by legitimate tenants.

Legit impressed with the sharpness of that text at that size. That’s definitely not from any fly-by-night back-alley Indian factory using sweatshop labour.

Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.

If your business model requires the economic exploitation of your workers, your company possesses no legitimate reason to exist.

I keep on forgetting that “threads” (in lowercase) is frequently being used to refer to “Threads” the Facebook thing, and not separate sub-communities within the Fediverse.

Was getting all confused as to why Fediverse instances were internally blocking each other.

Y’all all need to learn capitalization, yo. Helps reduce confusion by turning certain things into the proper nouns that they actually are.

Crime is a result of desperation and lack of economic opportunities.

Chronic addictions are a result of untreated/untreatable trauma.

Homelessness arises from poverty and precarious economic conditions, and can trigger both of the prior two.

And yet, these people are voting for the parties that would seek to implement and perpetuate poverty, precariousness, trauma and economic inequality.

…the fuq?

NCS is a company that offers information communication and technology services.

Wait…

he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials.

Okay, what the guy did was immature and shitty, but holy hell this company is incompetent. How did their own internal IT not lock him out of anything even remotely sensitive the moment he was fired?

the phrase “deny, defend, depose” reportedly written on the shooter’s ammunition

This is likely in reference to a book that is highly critical of the medical insurance field called “Delay, Deny Defend”. Except here, the shooter actually did depose the CEO for his company’s actions.

And so his purge of bipartisan and democratic leaders of the military allows him to ensconce lackeys that won’t question or refuse orders to invade other countries, like Canada.

People keep on saying that America won’t invade other countries, like Panama or Canada. THIS IS WHY THEY WILL BE ABLE TO DO SO.

What is the common thread that links almost all of these crazies? I mean, even more than religion.

Conservatism. Almost all of them vote for, or are elected representatives of, conservative parties.

And conservatism encourages divisiveness and bigotries like this. To be suspicious of and actively hate others, to find “evil” where none exist. To believe in falsehoods even when they have been demonstrably debunked.

Conservatism of all stripes is fundamentally evil. Conservatism is what will destroy civilization, and eventually, humanity.

On a personal level, I have never liked Louis Rossmann. There is something about him that I have never been able to define - his cockiness, or brashness or the way he carries himself, IDK - that has always rubbed me the wrong way. If we meet IRL, I am not sure if we could ever be friends.

And yet…

I will always be a staunch supporter of him. I will always watch and promote his videos. I will always be behind him 100%.

Because he fights the good fight. Because he fights the right fight.

And because he is careful in his research, points out where he is unsure, qualifies where there is nuance, and doesn’t pull any punches when faces need punching. His content is invariably not just correct and detailed, but also accurate and precise.

And most of all: despite his career success, he still fights for the little guy. That one of my favourite videos was a detailed rant about how the very career path he had taken was no longer available to other young people because of how restricted individual parts have become, and how in many cases you can now only obtain assemblies that are much more expensive.

Welcome to climate change. This is just the tip of the iceberg: things are just going to continue getting worse and worse each and every year.

The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.

Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.

You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.

And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.

And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.

Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.

And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.

And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.

Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.

Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it.

Oh, c’mon. it is trivial to make an SSID “hidden” for any networking tech that you have administrative control over. That way, only those “in the know” will know the SSID name to type in, in order to access said wireless network. It would not be “discoverable” by standard wireless-connectivity gear such as the default wifi interface in mobile phones.

Virtually every single bad adaptation can be directly traced back to studio interference.

Movies like LoTR only happened because the studios thought it would be a colossal flop, and so left the directors and producers alone.

If you want great movies, the studios need to leave the producers and directors the hell alone.