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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Tax homes based on how many you own, and how many are vacant. Allow two homes at a regular rate; Enough for a summer and winter home. Then ratchet tax rates up as the person buys more.

    And if the third, fourth, fifth, etc home sits vacant for more than a few months out of the year? The tax rate goes up even more, so giant corporations can’t just buy entire neighborhoods and sit on them to remove them from the market and increase property values for the other homes they own across town. Because that’s what’s happening now; Giant corps are buying homes and letting them sit vacant, just to remove them from the market so they can charge higher rates elsewhere. Allow a few months of grace for renovations and finding tenants… But after a ~3 month grace period, that tax rate skyrockets.

    And then take the revenue from these increased taxes, and use them to fund First Time Homebuyer programs, so home ownership becomes more available to the people who are renting. Incentivize the corporations to actually flip the houses and resell or rent them, instead of just sitting on them.



  • I mean, open source projects can be started or based in the US. But that doesn’t mean it’s an American project; it’s just that the people who started it happened to be American.

    I guess if we had to point to a specific American OSS, maybe Tor would qualify? It was initially developed by the CIA, so that may qualify it as US OSS. But it has since taken on a life of its own and the CIA doesn’t have any hand in active development anymore… So it’s still hard to say that even “being made by the literal US government” qualifies an OSS project as “American”.

    It’s sort of a Ship of Theseus situation. At what point in the development process do we consider it a non-American project?