Sounds like you’re the one misunderstanding goodwill. Goodwill doesn’t donate to ANY causes. Their ONLY contribution is employing disabled people and providing jobs/training. You can read it on their own website.

Who does Goodwill help? Goodwill serves those with barriers to employment. This includes individuals with disabilities, people with limited work history, those who have experienced corporate downsizing and recipients of government support programs. Goodwill’s services are designed to meet the training and placement needs of the individual. https://www.goodwill.org/faqs/#d7

There well known for paying their disabled employees below minimum wage while paying local store CEOs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

So don’t tell me about how the high prices I pay will support charities.

This is a store where people GIVE away their stuff, out of the goodness of their hearts with the premise that it will be sold at a low price so that someone less fortunate can benefit. If goodwill has decided to sell the merchandise it gets for FREE at “fair market value” to the highest bidder in order to maximise profit then what’s the point of goodwill? Might as well use a consignment store and get a cut.

The exchange in “Goodwill” is that you’re donating in goodwill so your things can help others. That’s what goodwill MEANS.

I found dollarama products listed for $5+ at the local goodwill. Let’s not just make the blanket assumption that exploited goodwill workers are professional appraisers and that the customer is the problem.

I chose NOT diddling kids!

I’m generalizing here, but men’s lib looks VERY different to women’s lib. Women started from a position of very low power, liberation was nearly a continuous improvement for all but the most privileged women.

Men’s lib requires first giving up a lot of patriarchal power before gaining the benefits of men’s lib, which in my opinion far surpass those of patriarchal power. There are a lot of barriers to this. First, most “online” feminists talk only about giving up patriarchal power. This feels hostile to most men and has bolstered misogynist influencers like tate et al. Second real life men and women are typically both complicit as men in enforcing patriarchal views of what a man is supposed to be. You can see experiences of men crying or expressing real emotion in front their prospective significant others as a prime example of this. Third there is no easy to access popular description of the benefits to men of men’s lib. There are great examples, but they aren’t as culturally relevant as patriarchal influencers yet.

The path to men’s lib is complex and has very different challenges than women’s lib. I think we’re getting there, but it’s certainly a slow process and at this time I think the counter reaction is more prevalent and popular.

The complete disregard for “purity” is what made English flexible enough to become the defacto default common language of most of the world. Your pursuit of language purity is in fact very un-English.

It’s never throwing your ballot in the garbage though. I used to think the same way, but every vote on the left, even if for the lesser evil, even if they lose, moves the conversation to the left. When we all stay home you get maga nutjobs stealing the show running unchecked.

Last thing is that gerrymandered states are the EASIEST to upset by increasing voter turnout. To gerrymander effectively you have to put your opponent in dense areas they’ll win by a large margin, then spread your side so that you barely win the rest of the districts. That means that a 5% increase in votes on the left can take you from a loss to a nearly complete victory in a gerrymandered state.

Vote splitting on the other hand is a trickier beast, but in the end if all the left votes go to a moderate then that gives the left a lot of leverage because if the moderate candidate doesn’t bend to the left then they’ll lose the next election.

Always vote.

Housing can’t be an investment (i.e. exponential growth above inflation) AND an affordable place for people to live for future generations. This mentality is absolutely brain-dead.

Most crypto transactions are trivially identifiable these days. Most blockchain are an unencrypted public leger and most crypto retailers like coinbase require government ID.

I love the caption! 6 people holding a seance but they have 22 hands lol

Jokes aside the fact that people put the effort to caption their images for accessibility is awesome!

I’m sorry, I just have a hard time agreeing with you on the definition of progressive taxation here. Sure SOME rich people will pay more than SOME poor people. But even that statement is tenable at best. Certainly MOST rich people will pay less than an average family farm. Most rich people will pay less than an average person who owns a self sufficient rural homestead lot.

It’s not as bad as the libertarian “15/15/15 flat tax” that was making the rounds a few years ago, but that’s the best that can be said about it.

I like a lot of consequences of the LVT, like that if famously solves the downtown parking lot problem. But I’d never call it progressive. A progressive tax should tax people who own more wealth more than those who own less. If you tax someone who owns a multi million dollar hotel the same as someone who owns an empty lot next door all you’re doing is making it so that only the rich can afford lots. Then when they improve the lot to make more money you reward them by effectively taking a smaller percentage of their new found wealth.

It’s not progressive.

How much land does Musk or Bezos own? How much land does an average farmer own?

Amazon warehouses are built on the unimproved equivalent of farmland or worse. The Amazon warehouse generates millions in annual profit. The same parcel of land gets a farmer a meager income and we should tax BOTH THE SAME???

If you come up with a tax that has any chance of taxing an old farmer more than it taxes Musk or Bezos, don’t come tell me it’s progressive.

Also I’m sick of hearing that somehow this tax “can’t be passed down to the consumer”. If every plot of land nearby is taxed the same, all the owners will shrug and say “sorry that’s just what it costs”. It’s the very definition of things that will be passed down to the consumer. Take your libertarian BS out of here.

Selling your home so there’s more homes on the market as a solution is equivalent to turning the water off while brushing your teeth to fight the dwindling supply of water.

Fucking EXACTLY. Every drop counts, not running the water uselessly for 4 minutes a day saves enough water for you to survive a full day. Sure there are people wasting more water and we need to spend more energy reducing their waste, but just because someone is worse than you doesn’t mean you’re “good”.

Yeah, damn those tenants who use their legal rights to actually get their landlords to maintain their own damn property. They’re just mean. If only all tenants just did free labour for their landlords, the world would be a better place.

What a fucking joke.

Landlords gonna landlord. You’re literally the guy in the meme “owning other people’s homes and complaining about it”

Basically you wrote a story where you’re the good guy who out of the goodness of his heart rented his only house at HALF MARKET VALUE just because you love the poor and want to help them. Then an EVIL NON LAND OWNING tenant moves in and destroys it for no reason. And you didn’t even make any money. What a disaster. Thankfully for your landlord you’re a good land owning tenant. If only all tenants were like you.

What a joke.

Other businesses “we can provide you with a good or a service in exchange for money”

Landlords “I own your house so you owe me half your income”

Yeah, no difference at all /s

Land value tax is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. “Unimproved” value? So basically when rich people get together and build mansions, next to them we build affordable housing. Both pay the same tax because the unimproved land is worth the same? Or maybe you’d argue that because the other mansions were built that the land is now worth more because it’s more desirable. That logic applies to the affordable housing next door though, so the rich can kick the poor out of house and home just by being nearby.

No, all taxes need to be extremely progressive because the wealthy simply consume more from society than the poor. A poor person can be poor anywhere. A rich person can only accumulate and hoard vast wealth if the society they parasite provides them with a steady source of healthy and intelligent workers and vast access to energy and natural resources to consume. The rich take more from society and need to pay more.

Taxes also need to apply to every possible economic transaction because unlike the poor, the rich can afford to do weird things to escape taxation. If we tax only one thing you can bet your ass the rich will find a way to avoid it and only the poor and working class will pay, allowing the rich to hoard wealth unimpeded leading to the tremendous inflation we see now.

Should have sold your house. Another person could have bought it. Being the owner, they would have more respect for it since it’s their loss of it gets wrecked. Adding another house to the market also increases supply and makes houses more affordable.

Your landlord also should have sold his house and you could have bought it instead of paying his mortgage.

The ethical use case for rentals is short and medium term for travelers and people who are in a place for a few months to a year.

Basically Google started monetizing it’s semantic matching engine. It’s what made Google results so great. For example if you searched the word “tall” it would include results for “big”, “height”, etc… with each word being ranked by closeness to what you searched.

Well now they made it so they will match monetisable words preferentially, like brand names for example.

It’s likely the main reason Google results have been getting so shitty lately, the semantic match engine is one of the things that made the results great. Now it’s an ad delivery engine and the results are crap.

If you’re trying to claim that a series of carefully selected “neutral” facts don’t create a narrative then you’re either being purposefully obtuse or extremely naive.

I note that you haven’t aknowledged that bill C-16 doesn’t create any protections for trans people that don’t already exist for other minorities and I think that says a lot about this conversation.

Lastly, when reality paints a deeply negative picture of someone, “neutral facts” must reflect that reality. Painting a bad person in a “neutral” light is not being unbiased. If I said of the unibomber that he was “an esoteric reclusive mathematician who was eventually arrested due to his anti-technology views” that’s a bunch of neutral facts, but it’s deeply biased to paint a terrorist murderer in a “neutral light”. Unbiased facts must reflect the murderous reality of his actions.