Which is something Santa Fe is in particular need of, since they have an extremely restrictive ordinance on housing development.

Here, you lost this

u

I mean, I’m not really understanding how this is a win “for the people”. As per the article, the tax itself is quite small, and there is a loophole allowing them to not be taxed on real estate investments. So they are just shifting their wealth to real estate.

Almost had what? You seem to be reading a lot into my comment. Also, the way you are phrasing it makes you sound like a pompus asshole.

Yes and no. They are petite bourgeois. They own their own means of production.

They did do it for a profit motive. Through whatever instincts or thought processes the beavers had, they figured that they would benefit from damming the river. The dam creates favorable conditions for hunting, nesting, and storing food. These benefits are a sort of profit. Money is a convenient kind of profit, because you can easily turn it into whatever other kind of thing you want and you can store it for later use - and also it is convenient to talk about in economic terms, since it is uniform and easily quantifiable. But no one (or, few people anyway) want money purely for the sake of having money - they want money because it allows them to have other things. Food, housing, good conditions for mating and raising their young.

Sorry. The beavers were only in it for themselves.

Idk. I don’t fuck with them, they don’t fuck with me. Bees are pretty docile in my experience. Been stung plenty by wasps, though.

This is just literally how the world works

3028. Maybe more. His wealth is going to pass on to someone.

Idk, I’ve never been stung by a bee. I might be deathly allergic, but I have no idea.

dmgl

The internet hate machine is hardly an exclusively American problem.

The great irony being that Us Magazine is a tabloid that reports almost exclusively on celebrity gossip - people who clearly aren’t “Us”

She’s an OF model and this is her niche. It’s literally her job.

Typically professionals do ensure all their partners are tested beforehand.

what are the chances that the next person “inspired by” her will also do this safely?

Puritanical hand wringing. Tons of people have unsafe sex every day. If you want to lower STI spread, create public awareness campaigns and improve sex ed for students.

Otoh, it also provides jobs for the community, either directly (cleaning, handyman work, management) or indirectly (additional tourist dollars in local establishments).

The reality is, in almost all places, short term rentals have an extremely negligible impact on the housing market. And in the few places where they have a measurable impact, we need to ask: why can’t that area just build more housing? And the answer, almost invariably, is restrictive zoning codes, coupled with land speculation. Solving the problem of lack of housing doesn’t require banning short term rentals, an action which would likely have a significant negative impact on local businesses who rely on the tourist dollars. Solving the problem involves liberalizing zoning ordinances to allow more housing to be built, and adopting Georgist Land Value Taxes which preclude investors’ ability to speculate on land value rather than only earning money via value they provide to other people.

To enhance his public image

Why would he want/need to do this? There are a bunch of other billionaires in the world who have basically no public image whatsoever - why wouldn’t he just do that? And if he is so concerned about his reputation, why would he constantly draw the public’s eye towards the one thing that would ruin his reputation if he actually is embezzling money through his charities?

If Bill is so philanthropic, why does he keep $110bn outside his charity and only $42bn inside.

Because when your money is more liquid it is more flexible? Idk, ask him.

Right, but then why would he constantly talk about it? Why wouldn’t he just say “yeah, I donate a lot to charity”, feign ignorance about the concept of effective charities, and then arbitrarily dole out money to a mix of innumerable small local charities and shell charities which feed back into his pocket? Like, the number one rule of doing crime is “don’t draw attention to yourself when you are committing crime”. You don’t announce to all your coworkers that you are going to the kwikymart 5 minutes before you rob the kwikymart.

Lol. As one of those tech workers I’ll never forgive Bill for making slashes the wrong way in DOS.

But also, his foundation does good work and I support it. The amount of hate he’s getting in this thread just builds up the amount of eye roll I have for anyone who describes themselves as a “leftist”

This is correct.

He’s gone in depth about this a number of times, where he talks about the complexity of using philanthropic money effectively. For example, is a dollar better spent educating poor children, or building wells in rural communities? Providing bed nets for malaria, or treatments for tuberculosis? And then once you decide on the cause you will put your money into, how do you ensure the money goes where you wanted it to go, rather than being syphoned off by bureaucrats, reallocated to spurious pet projects, or lining the pockets of some local warlord? And once your money has gone to the cause, how do you measure its impact to ensure it was money well spent? Do people actually use the well? Does it provide clean water? Does it work reliably? Did rates of malaria actually go down, or are people too lazy to use the bed nets? Etc.

These things are complicated and take time to figure out. Hence why all the “donate it now” comments are ridiculous.