bringing @juliadoubleday.bsky.social’s excellent tweets in here:

My library back then charged a nickel per page to use the copiers, & that was before digital cameras were even common/affordable, let alone part of every phone.

Biathlon, adapted from the Finnish national sport of killing Russian soldiers

"gkzschitter," with the "gkz" pronounced as a long strangular uvular fricative

Billiards-chess-bowling on ice with huge granite rocks and beer.

If she's not enthusiastic about a second time after the first time, you're doing it wrong.

...renewal rent above a cap.
Make landlording NOT an "infinite money hack" anymore.

Or, we can take inspiration from how Chairman Mao solved the problem - much simpler, but I don't think the American Working Class are /quite/ angry enough to support something so violent, yet.

...that they wouldn't have earned if they paid in full on time.

Before they can use the cosmetic improvements trick, they need a 3rd party assessment of the value before & after, including a survey of all tenants for THEM to give feedback on the changes, to judge whether they justify increasing...

...these structures, under oath, charge every individual signing off in the papers with perjury, demand maximum penalties & prison time.
Then they need to pay triple the tax underpayment as a civil judgement to compensate their tenants, & claw back performance based executive bonuses...

Specifically require that shell companies be combined for the counting, so 5 different LLCs owning a few buildings each, but all ultimately kicking profits up to the same PE firm, are considered a single landlord.
If they're not completely forthright & radically transparent about reporting...

...below Z; make it impossibly expensive to artificially choke the supply. No excuses for, "but nobody wants to buy!" - tell them to lower the asking price until it sells, or pay up.
Base the tax on total rent collected & how many units are vacant, escalating VERY quickly.

...hostile & aggressive about it, giving the absolute minimum notice that's legally required & evicting then mercilessly if they don't renew or vacate.
So, what we really need is a harshly punitive tax rate for owners of more than X units with a vacancy rate over Y% or average turnaround time...

There have been other stories ON NPR about these parasitic "institutional investors" buying large buildings, making minimal cosmetic improvements (NOT addressing tenant complaints), then using those as an excuse to inflate everybody's rent next time their lease is up for renewal.
They're very...

...a dozen landlords that when combined control half the rental units in a neighborhood, there's software that determines the optimal vacancy rate so they can get away with increasing the rent for all tenants while maintaining fewer units, ending up with higher income AND lower expenses. 👇🏻

Wall Street doesn't invest & STAY invested in a market unless it's profitable in the intermediate to long term; if the price of homes & rent started falling, they'd cash out & the market would plummet.
Also, medium-size landlords have been colluding to restrict supply & demand more rent.
Like if...

Recurrent infections are taking a toll on naive T cells - and immune dysregulation has sunk into large human population - and any insults from infectious agents are going to provoke imperfect responses - and top it with 7 to 8 month pDC suppression after each Covid 19 - and we completed 6 years!

They told us it was mild in children. www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-01...