Oh man, this was me trying to defeat Detleff in the final boss fight of Witcher 3’s Blood & Wine DLC.

I have no idea what I’m going to do when I get to that fight in my Death March playthrough…

The gag in this screenshot is also a call-back to S1E05, where Peralta is interrogating a perp and trying to “annoy him into confessing” by playing a guitar poorly and screaming.

I’m about 98% certain that RDM directed a handful of Enterprise episodes. Looks to me like threw on his old Voyager costume one day so the two shows’ helmsmen could take a photo together.

#janewaydidnothingwrong

It’s very likely to become my most recent “doesn’t need all my attention” game, as I always need one of those on deck (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Alright, I was probably going to play it anyway even with dips down to the low 20s. But if we’re not even at the full release yet and the modding scene is already squeezing more out of that bottom 1%, I’m just biting the bullet and buying the damned game.

For anyone in the same boat, Fanatical is selling the pre-release versions of the game for 17% off, packaged with a random “highly rated” Steam game. My freebie was Reventure, which is regularly $8.99 CAD.

#janewaydidnothingwrong

You think I’m under the impression that people buying homes today as rental investments are the problem? The problem isn’t people trying to buy into the scam today, it’s the people who bought into it 10, 15, 20 or more years ago, have owned multiple homes for years, make their living off the work and money of others, and go about their lives thinking they’re good people as if they’re anything more than parasites in need of excision.

But if you’re going to start name-calling and denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as “dumb as shit”, I question whether you’re approaching the topic in good faith. I’m not going to engage with you further.

When you sell that house, what percentage of the sale will you be offering to your tenant? Their income has been helping to build your equity, and mitigating your financial burdens after all.

Being “one of the good ones” only counts for so much when the very nature of what you’re doing is exploitive.

Rentals can (and should!) exist without landlords.

Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment,

You’ve already lost me. They’re the ones trying to treat homes as a commodity fit for investing. Investments carry risk. Passing the cost of that risk to tenants, or giving them a free pass because they’re being forced to play by real rules instead of the rigged game they’ve been taking advantage of, doesn’t sit well with me.

They made an investment that by its very nature exploits people. They should shoulder the consequences of that decision.

As mad as I am, it’s genuinely not about revenge. It’s about making the prospect of home ownership a realistic and attainable goal for entire generations of people for whom, right now, it’s literally a joke.

Fact is there’s not really any way to both return housing prices to realistic levels and keep prices steady for current owners. I don’t pretend this is a simple problem, or that solving it won’t cause other problems as a result. But in my opinion the problem you’re suggesting is of a much lesser scale than what we’re facing today, and has less drastic solutions. Using the taxes collected from serial landleeches to compensate normal people who need to move during and following the market crash to offset the debt caused by a now-underwater mortgage could be a solution, for example. And fuck knows the banks aren’t innocent in this whole mess themselves, and could probably be forced to shoulder their share of the burden as well.

But if Bob moves Doug into his second house, then he’s now either a) exploiting his brother instead of a stranger, which most landleeches are less likely to want to do, or (more likely) b) giving his brother a better rent to avoid exploiting his brother… and is thus making a much smaller profit than when he was exploiting the Ahmed family. And if not, then at least Bob only has so many brothers he can rent to, so the worst kinds of Bob will eventually have to sell off some number of properties.

But the goal of the immediate family exemption is to allow families to help each other own homes that aren’t beholden to some shit stain developer or daywalking asshat. Specifically to let boomer and gen-x parents provide struggling millenial or gen-z children with homes, but I’m sure I could come up with a handful of other semi-likely relevant situations as well.

Back to your example though, the lack of profit he’s now making pushes Bob to sell the place. And because all his landleech buddies are making less and less money per hoarded home, they’re also more likely to be unloading their surplus stock at the same time. And if these people all lose money on the sale of their extra homes as prices come crashing down, fucking good.

And as prices come down, more people who are currently renting because buying is prohibitively expensive are able to stop renting and move into a place they own, this freeing up rental spaces.

Of course I’d also support going much more simple and literally forcing landleeches to give their hoarded homes on pain of prison time, but I figured that’s a little more radical than the general population could ever come close to supporting.

Rental highrises are not single-family homes. What we need there are more stringent rent control and to move the majority of such rentals from for-profit property developers to non-profit housing cooperatives.

We could also prohibit property developers from purchasing highrises from each other altogether. You want a new high-rise? Build one. You don’t want one of the ones you own? You get to sell it to a cooperative for a heavily regulated maximum price, and might get to break even.

The only support this pussbag deserves is a set of pallbearers.

What we need to do is de-incentivize the commodification of housing entirely. Really make it unprofitable to deal in homes while passing the risk for your “investment” on to the people you’re exploiting.

I’m talking about an outright ban on all corporations, foreign and domestic, from owning single family homes — corporations need offices, not homes, and shell corporations and LLCs don’t even need those. Give a one year grace period, then tax all rental income collected from single-family homes at 100%. Maybe fine them each year too until they shape up.

I’m talking about regulating rental prices on short-term rentals, and capping the annual income allowed from short-term rental units to a value indexed against minimum wage (or preferably the area’s living wage, determined not by any level of government itself but by valid third party organizations).

I’m talking an annual federal tax on properties not occupied full time by the owner or their immediate blood relative. Parent, sibling, or child. Something insane, maybe 400-800% of the home’s property tax. Multiply it exponentially for each hoarded home. Throw in an exception for a second home if it’s far enough from the first (people who own cottages aren’t the problem, and shouldn’t be penalised). But only for the second home — nobody needs two or three or four “vacation homes”.

That’s how we force land-rich boomers out of the housing “market” and get homes into the hands of people who need them, who should have a right to stable housing, who are currently being blocked from the market by vampiric land leeches.

Boo — and I cannot stress this enough — fucking hoo.

So is the Dutch flag. 🇳🇱

Federation of downvotes/reduces and upvotes/favorites is spotty at best, even across instances that are definitely otherwise federated.

Or time travel, then violence.