if muslims really can't deal with other people mumbling around them in different ways than them, they need to find a way to be more tolerant.

it's a good example of how islam needs to change to adjust to the modern world.

i think most people, especially in the west, would actually be moderately or even extremely strongly supportive of the idea that the jews should be allowed to mumble at their old crumbing wall and would certainly not denounce an activist minister for pushing the idea forward. they might even argue it's petty and small and mean to deny them access to the crumbling, or to ban the mumbling. it's bumbling to ban the mumbling at the crumbling.

i actually think they should bulldoze the whole site and build a shopping mall on top of it so nobody is mumbling at the wall anymore and they don't have anything to fight about anymore.

but so long as the crumbling walls remain, anybody and everybody should be able to mumble at them equally.

as a secular atheist leftist and self-identified godless liberal, i couldn't possibly support a law that says only one type of delusional nonsense is allowed to mumble at the wall. that's absurd.

all jews and muslims, and christians and mormons if they want, should be allowed to pray and mumble at the wall here and it is long past time that equal status to the ruins be afforded to all.

this is not a right-wing position at all; this is a crazy rule that should be changed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg58yj57jdeo

i kind of like being weird, myself.

if you're not weird, you're boring.

i need at least one mr. kite reference at the democratic convention, please.

just to be weird.

yes, i'm suggesting that it should be downright illegal and punishable with jail time to use rental income to pay off your mortgage, and i'd like one of the major parties to pick the idea up in the next election.

a reasonable law to pass would be to make it illegal to rent a property until or unless you have paid some amount, x, of the price of the mortgage, and i would put x as higher than 75%. that is, in order to rent a property out, you'd have to have already paid at least 75% of the mortgage off. they should actually put you in jail for breaking that law, as well.

this would prevent people from putting minimal down payments down just to get property to generate profit from. capitalists are actually supposed to hate that kind of lazy, idle bourgeoisness.

apparently, to a southeast asian, "guava" is a generic term that refers to any kind of large citrus fruit, while in north america it refers to a specific species native to mexico. in an act of reverse-colonialism, mexican guavas have been introduced as a plantation species in hawaii and vietnam and have displaced some of the native fruit. a pomelo is a native south-east asian citrus variety.

somebody probably made an honest mistake and the actual truth is that, to a southeast asian, a pomelo actually is a guava.

they're wrong, but that explains it.

my pomelo is unripe :(.

'twill have to wait.

this, too, shall pass.

i'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but i don't see an actual, measurable shift in the polling since biden resigned. there's a certain subset of the electorate that has more enthusiasm for harris, but you can only vote once, and it's not clear that this subset will vote at all, so it doesn't actually really matter if the media prefers harris over biden.

harris has received a bump amongst black voters but in most states that should be offset and actually exceeded by a decrease in enthusiasm amongst older white voters, who may now consider trump, when they didn't previously. it's a question of whether exciting more younger black voters to vote may be more effective than getting out the vote for older white voters, and that strikes me as a failed strategy. younger, blacker people vote far less frequently than older, whiter people, especially in states with barriers to voting. it's unclear how much of the excited demographic will be able to vote, even if they show up and try to.

the media got what it wanted and it's producing the narrative it wants to, but it isn't rooted in evidence and it may turn out to not reflect in the numbers on voting day, where trump's more traditional strategy simply works better and he consequently wins.

for these reasons, harris maybe puts michigan and georgia back on the table, if not convincingly, but she probably makes wisconsin and pennyslvania harder to win.

i don't see the evidence to support the idea that trump isn't going to win in a landslide.

yeah.

it's been a national embarrassment for years that the government has completely deregulated immigration policy, allowing private companies to by labour from overseas. this is a national disgrace, and i'm glad the un is taking us to task for it, because the government won't address it.

https://www.lakelandtoday.ca/beyond-local/canadas-temporary-foreign-worker-program-a-breeding-ground-for-modern-slavery-un-report-concludes-9342820

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/18/plho-j18.html

a life without kiwis is no life at all.

my door is about to be wired fucking shut for weeks. nobody's getting in here. the stay is in place and the landlords can go fuck themselves.

but i need kiwis first.

when the apocalypse comes, i'd better have kiwis, or i'm not going in the bomb shelter.

ok.

replacing the shit kiwis is not the end of the world because walmart will refund them and they didn't have cherries or blackberries, so i can get the kiwis with the cherries and the blackberries, and some original all bran that's finally back in stock. further, the refund on the fake guava will pay for delivery and it balances out.

great.

(white) guava has the highest amount of vitamin c of any fruit, if you didn't know.

pomelo is some kind of half-assed grapefruit, apparently, that can't compete with the amount of vitamin a, even remotely.

i also need to find some kiwi asap as what they sent should not have been sold.

i ordered guava and they sent me a fucking pomelo. what am i supposed to do with this, play soccer with it? i can't fit this in my fridge, so i suppose it must be immediately consumed.

i have never had pomelo before.

should i live vlog this? naw. but i'll blog it.

if russia is the great protagonist of history, iran is the great loser.

it looks set to lose again very soon.

trump is supposed to be tough.

why isn't iran so afraid of him that they can't hack him? i thought that was his argument, that he's so scary that the world will cower at america's feet.

iran isn't cowering, iran is hacking at his feet like an annoying shiatsu.

c'mon coyote. give iran a kick in the teeth, tough guy.

it's been widely published that we have a housing shortage and this is true and is driving the market, but sorting through the small number of vacancies available and comparing it to what i can afford has led me to a secondary conclusion, which is that rents are almost always paying somebody's mortgage. this is an unsustainable situation which has been a hidden bubble in the rental market that is being exposed by higher interest rates and is going to need to burst because it doesn't make any sense.

almost all of the rental housing available on the market is something like the following:

- a condo which was purchased by an investor and being rented out, in which case the renter is paying the owner's mortgage

- a house which was purchase by an investor and being rented out, in which case the renter is paying the owner's mortgage, perhaps split into multiple units, or rented as a rooming house.

the number of actual apartment buildings on the market is exceedingly scarce, and this would be a reflection of the insufficient supply. because we don't have enough apartments, what the market has produced is houses and condos for rent, instead. that makes sense on it's face.

except it doesn't and it can't because the purpose of renting instead of buying is that it is less than a mortgage and it can't be if the cost of rent is necessarily higher than the mortgage to ensure the rentier can turn a profit. if i can buy a house for less than i can rent it for, why would i rent it? the point is that i'm renting because i can't afford to buy.

now that interest rates are higher, we have a situation where people are not just complaining that they figuratively cannot afford to pay rent or are forced into paying more than 30% of income in rent but actually literally have costs that cannot cover rent. paying rent as mortgage + rentier profit is literally impossible. it's unsustainable. and, that makes sense. renters shouldn't be able to afford to pay the mortgage on the property they're renting, let alone the mortgage + profit for the rentier; that's why they're renting, and not buying.

rentiers are not supposed to have mortgages or two or three mortgages or reverse mortgages and profiting from rent is not supposed to be a form of primary income for middle class people that have their own bills to pay. rent is supposed to be a form of income by people that own their property without mortgages (like apartment building owners) or a type of secondary income for people that have extra space. 

it makes no sense for people to buy houses with mortgages and expect to make a profit by renting them on top of paying the mortgage. that should have never been presented as a business model, but it has been, and it's the root of the problem.

we have this massive housing market built on an irrational concept and it has to crash. if we're going to have interest rates again, we need to get these small scale investors out of the rental market, build more apartments and (by removing the middle man) get the people that are renting the property from the small scale investors to instead be buying the property from the banks. these middle-man bourgeois investors were always parasites, but they're now breaking the market and need to get out. there's no place for a middle man in today's rental market. they're the cause of the problem right now.

with interest rates and inflation, renters cannot afford to pay their owners' mortgages, and the middle man needs to get out; otherwise, the market in the next few years is going to open up as people get evicted (because they can't pay rent, or the owners need to boost it to break even) and more vacancies will exist, but owners won't be able to decrease their prices enough to adjust to market demand because they have to pay the bank, and renters will simply not be able to pay the price of mortgage + profit that the small scale investor needs to avoid losing money. the result will be the irrational outcome of homelessness + higher vacancy rates, which is currently already present in the condo market, and which is a market failure, by definition. it may require the cmhc to step in to bail out small scale investors.

otherwise, the small scale investors will go bankrupt and need to sell to the people they are currently renting to, and that is a good thing and a healthy adjustment and correction. fuck the middle man. fuck the parasitic bourgeois class. yes, demand is outstripping supply, but it has exposed this issue as a secondary dominant problem that government needs to address. we need less small scale investors stepping in between potential buyers and banks and trying to extract profit from renters that should be buying those properties instead. government should enact policies to get the middle man out.

i can own a small house or condo on odsp if prices come down about 10%, interest rates come back down a bit and i can build up a bit of a down payment while i'm waiting this out. i can't wait it out. i don't think. i might be proven wrong.

a lot of these small scale investors are older and it will be interesting to see what happens when they die in the next ten years.

so, i am now in priority status for subsidized housing. i should end up with an actual apartment sometime in the next year, if it goes according to plan. the asshole landlords will need to wait me out, and may lose some cases at the board in the process. getting a stay was a little trickier than i expected but it's done and everything is going according to plan.

i'm disabled. i live on social assistance. i'm supposed to be in social housing. i don't want to be exclusivist about this because i legitimately believe that refugees deserve short term housing, but i require long term housing and i should actually be placed at the top of the list by default. i would call for a change of the formula so that disabled people with long term social needs get priority over refugees that need to stay in a hotel for some short term help; currently, in ontario, refugees are top priority for housing, and they shouldn't be, they should be lower on the list. we need to take care of our own first. most of the problems we have with disabled poverty levels would be solved by reformulating the priority list to get them in social housing where they're supposed to be but largely currently aren't. it doesn't make sense to put disabled people on the housing market; it makes perfect sense to put refugees on the housing market, because they are in fact expected to work, whereas the disabled are, by definition, not.

so, this is a bit of a shitty tactic to push forward something i should have easier access to, but it's in process and hopefully it enacts itself soon.

one of the upsides of social housing in windsor and canada is that it's non-smoking. good luck finding an apartment building anywhere willing to enforce a no-smoking policy, even if they advertise it or even prefer it. it's not worth it to them. the city enforces it by bylaw, it's city property. otherwise, if you want non-smoking, you need to buy a condo, which is post #2 this morning.