Everyone I Like Should Live Within A Five Mile Radius Of Me

I think adults need summer vacation. Like let's just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I'm so tired.

when none of ur internet friends are online

timezoned again

clockblocked

FUCK

HEY DEVIANTART USERS PLEASE DON'T SCROLL PAST THIS THIS IS IMPORTANT

OPT OUT NOW

True..

I have cochlear implants and I can only buy parts to fix them or upgrade then from 1 corporation bc of tech exclusivity. upgrades to get new processors for both ears cost $23k & insurance only covers 90% (and it’s “good” insurance)

cyberpunk dystopia is already here for the disabled. fight for universal healthcare, fight against capitalism NOW.

Cyberpunk dystopia is already here for the disabled.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Ah, forever and ever one of the greatest bits ever put to film.

Needs the first part!  It was where I, as a wee lad of 16,  first heard the words “Anarchosyndicalist Commune”

Not even queueing this, making SURE it’s posted for coronation day.

There’s some company, blackstone, blackwater, something like that, buying up houses that go on sale for 30k above asking price. Immediately outbidding anyone who tries to buy. Corporations are also buying property all across america.

Fuck…

Nobody comes to my tumblr for this, but Americans need to understand that THIS is why my generation can’t afford to own a house outside of Smallest-Town USA. THIS is also why people my age in bigger cities struggle to find decent apartments that don’t consume half of our monthly income.

Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That’s value they can borrow against, that’s a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that’s a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It’s probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can’t afford to take you to court.

I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who’ve lived there for generations because they can’t keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the “affordable” housing for an entire neighborhood. It’s gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that’s left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.

If that wasn’t bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you’ve instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future “improvements” that further contribute to the commodification of communities.

Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.

These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can’t it’s because we’re lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.

I hate these fuckers so fucking much.

people need shelter. corporations that exploit this at the expense of humanity are a nightmare.

the original idea of airbnb is that people would let out their spare rooms, or their own while they were out of town. that was wholesome. what it has become is just not.

Full article

Taggingz: @politicsofcanada

Website is https://ratethelandlord.org/ , by the way.  It’s currently dealing with a bit of a traffic overload.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) + introduction of The Shire

I'm saying this as a fan, but also as somebody who worked their arse off writing screenplays at film school, don't hate on the writers when they go on strike.

Writers control the story of the show, there is so much detail and fine tuning done in the scripts. Everything an actor or a director adds, is adapted from the script. There is no show without the script, but still screenwriters are horrendously underappreciated and underpaid.

Director, actors and producers usually end up with most of the credit.

Writers deserve to be seen. If your favorite show is delayed because of the upcoming strikes, don't be surprised and please don't be angry at the writers. They are fighting for their art to be appreciated.

Some of your shows are gonna get cancelled.

Some will come back but lose their momentum and you'll wish they'd been cancelled.

This isn't the fault of writers. This is the fault of the studios.

The Writers' Guild has made a list of demands that will cost $500 million a year across the ENTIRE industry. Every studio, every streaming service, every film, every show, every writer: total cost $500 million. One streaming alone could foot the entire bill and still be in comfortable profit. Its half of what Amazon spent on Rings of Power alone. A little more than what Netflix spent on The Gray Man.

The studios can easily afford this. They're just being assholes about it.

Don't blame the writers.

It's easy to support strikes at first - to swap memes and say "Go Union!" and tell writers we support them.

It's harder two months in. Four months. Eight.

If this goes like the last few writers' strikes - it means a terrible tv season, a delay in movies, big changes in late-night talk shows (the talk isn't scripted; the monologues and jokes are--and they don't have half a dozen scripts in the can; they have to be written based on recent news), and other areas we won't notice until it's underway.

Strikes are a game of chicken. AMPTP is counting on public backlash to convince the WGA to back down, and that won't happen right away.

The writers are risking a lot for this. They're not getting paid while they wait. (There may be strike funds, but there are no new project deals, no bonuses, no overtime pay, and so on. And the strike fund isn't unlimited.) They're pinning a lot of hope on the skills of their negotiators.

So when they tell you what would help - believe them. That's always "don't cross the picket lines" and "express support publicly" and "if you can get there in person, the picket lines appreciate coffee and snacks." It is always "don't take a scab job doing the work that someone on strike is refusing to do." (Note that in this case, the WGA has the right to block future membership from scabs. You can't get an edge in the industry by taking the jobs that are going to open up.)

Anything other than that, the negotiators try to figure out.

Maybe that's "It'd help if people suspend or cancel their streaming services." Maybe it's "please DON'T suspend or cancel them - that's how they feel the pressure to produce new content. If people cancel, they'll claim there's less demand, less money for the writers."

We're on the outside, and there's a lot of moving parts. Listen to the union when they tell you how you can help.

And be ready to stand by them, even months later when (1) your new shows on TV suck, because the only scripts available are the ones that were initially rejected, and (2) the AMPTP starts announcing how unreasonable the WGA is being, how it's misrepresenting their claims, how they don't understand how the business works, how there's this one case where the WGA demands would make everything worse for the writers involved.

It's all lies. Stand with the union. Trust them to know what's best for their workers.

Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today

fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes

May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love