Ctrl+F Hitler, ah, there it is. I feel like the xkcd comic missed an opportunity to have a 1932-1945 segment in there about the biggest cause of death for time travelers being OTHER time travelers killing them before they can successfully go back in time and kill Hitler, lol.

Re: conservation of reality, I feel like if I went back and shot Hitler, I would miss, or be stopped by security, or bad weather, or my gun would misfire, or even if I managed to actually do it, he’d be replaced by a look alike, and then it would turn out the guy we always thought was Hitler was actually just an actor, or something. Like if someone went back and killed baby Adolph when he was six months old, the parents would adopt another kid and name IT adolph, and there you go. Whatever happened happened and can’t be undone, not through magic resuscitation of a corpse, but through smooth and natural intervention of reality itself, if that makes sense…

I hear the universe is infinite, and no matter how far away from earth you go, there’s just infinitely more universe. So like if you are standing on earth looking twelve billion light years that way and then twelve billion light years the other way you are in a sphere of unimaginable size right? But if you actually went twelve billion light years that way once you get there you can still look this way or that way and see twelve billion more light years every which way. So from that perspective, pretty much anywhere in the universe is the center of the universe…from a certain point of view…

Yep that’s the joke ;)

Good news! If the MAGA party wins in November they’ll surely defund, gut, or do away with the EPA entirely, so pollution fines will drop to zero, clearly indicating pollution is gone!

I always thought of Quark as the moral center of DS9. Hear me out. It’s a darker show, much more shades of grey, a bit of a break from Roddenbury’s vision of star trek. Instead of Jean Luc’s pompous speeches, and Janeway’s infuriating (and inconsistent) adherence to the prime directive, DS9 actually toes the line and crosses it many times. Quark meanwhile has his own code, and he sticks to it as faithfully as anyone can. He is true to himself and his species and pretty much never crosses his own line - he crosses our line for sure, but rarely if ever his own. Pretty much the only time I can remember him doing something un-ferengi is when he turned down a gazillion bars of latinum to run weapons for those people planning on blowing up a planet with a few million people on it. At the end of the day you can always count on quark doing the right thing. He’s quite complex, and by far one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.

Yeah, himbo definition is unattractive and Rom is a sexy beast! How else did he land a knockout like Leeta?

You’re a very unpleasant person.

Calm down professor. The US is one of the only countries in the world to tax worldwide income, even if they are a nonresident of the US. That is NOT how it works in every country.

Here’s a pretty good article about it from the WSJ if you want to educate yourself on the subject: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-34630

It’s somewhat accurate to say “every penny they make is taxABLE to Uncle Sam” which is different from saying 100% tax rate. Americans living outside the US still need to file a tax return and report all their income, and pay tax on it to the US, even if it is from a foreign source. That said they could claim the foreign tax credit if they paid tax to a foreign regime on that income already, or the foreign income exclusion under some circumstances which would reduce their taxable income to the US.

Well thank god we don’t have any Death Panels from Obamacare though!

No, all you’re doing is shifting power from the big bad mean rich landlord into the hands of the government agency or agent in charge. How do you not understand that? No matter what there’s going to be an asshole with too much power/wealth.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

If you’re talking about eminent domain, the gov has to pay fair market value for the assets it takes, at least in the USA. So you’re just flat out wrong using that as an example because in this context you guys are talking about the government forcing someone to provide something to somebody else for free, or just seizing their property (!) to do it themselves.

I’m looking for you to be able to articulate a specific rule or set of rules with hard numbers and thresholds that applies to literally everyone. You can walk around all you want saying rich people are big bad meanies and should give this poor woman free housing. But it turns out people will always act in their own rational self interest, and until you can figure out a way to codify your values into law, you might as well be writing letters to santa. I wish everything were perfect and nobody wants for anything, but the universe just doesn’t work that way. It’s hard to believe there are so many people naive enough to not know this by now.

I’m definitely in the wrong place because all I’m hearing is a bunch of morons.

the government should control the property and not charge rent. It’s not that hard to understand

Yes it is hard to understand because we are having this conversation despite it being a ridiculous idea. If the gov controls the property and doesn’t charge rent, it doesn’t lower the cost. The value of that property doesn’t go away. It just changes hands from the private owner into the gov agency (or worse, agent) who controls who gets to live there. Imagine a neighborhood where everything costs $10k/month to live there, but you control who gets to live in that one place that costs $1,000/month. Think of how powerful a position that is. The value of that rental property didn’t magically disappear just because the government waived its magic wand and said so. Economics doesn’t work that way, and it’s really frustrating talking to people who don’t get this. You can’t solve these issues by decree.

Right, if only this mean rich person would go against their best interest and do something stupid. But they didn’t because there’s zero incentive to do so, because what you and everyone in this thread is suggesting is a bad decision to make of one’s own free will. So other folks are arguing the gov should step in and, what, force the owner to rent their unit to the squatter for free just because she’s old I guess?

I challenge you to codify your position. Meaning, if someone is over X years of age they get free rent? Or the gov pays their rent? Or if someone is over such and such net worth they have to give free rent to people? Or something? You’re just not making any sense and you’re arguing out of pure pathos, emotionally laden incoherent thoughts that you can’t build a functioning economy out of.

Man it’s always govt with you people. I challenge you to codify your feelings into actual policy with facts and figures rather than loaded emotional imagery like ‘govt should pay for housing for everyone.’

I read something recently analyzing what tends to happen when there’s tons of artificially cheap public housing. Market forces determine housing prices regardless of government interference, so when the govt rules by decree that their public housing will be cheaper, the price differential doesn’t go away, it just changes form. And more importantly, it changes hands. The price difference changes form from money into power, and it changes hands from the landlord into the govt agency or official in charge of determining who gets to live there and benefit from the lower cost. Make sense?

I don’t disagree that housing costs are out of control. I think everyone is missing the point though, and the cause. It isn’t mean rich people being evil bastards charging people too much. Right now what we are seeing is the natural result of decades of exponential economic growth. Real estate is an asset like any other with prices strongly positively correlated with other asset classes. If everything is growing exponentially like equities, of course real estate is going to grow along with them. I don’t know what the solution is, but it certainly isn’t anything suggested in this thread.

Who pays is a very valid question because right now you guys are all saying the owner should pay instead of the squatter. Then you go on to talk about tax money which implies the govt should pay. We live in a world of finite goods and resources which is why things are the way they are. These comments are like letters to Santa.

So govt forces owner to donate to 93 year old squatter charity instead of donating to a different charity of their choice. Still a forced donation because money is fungible, doesn’t matter who got there first.

The tax write-off bit means being rich enough that donating the building to charity won’t even make a dent in their wealth

Codify that. Ready set go.

You didn’t answer the question.