Seems like the sort of loophole that, once identified, would be pretty easy to close if the legislators actually desired to do so.

What’s your solution for folks who need short-term housing (for example someone relocating for work for a year, or someone going to college who doesn’t want to stay in dorms)?

In my magical Christmasland hypothetical scenario, it would be something like $10 ^ [number of qualifying properties] per year, for each property.

Mom and pop have a vacation home, or a property on the market? $10 / year. No problem. Got 5 vacant homes? That’ll be an extra $500,000 per year. Get a tenant or sell.

Would need some sort of limit such that the tax ceased when homelessness reached, say, 0.01% of the population or less, because right now there’s about 26 vacant homes in the US per homeless person; the point is to reduce homelessness, not to bankrupt everyone, of course.

Solution: A tax on residential property that isn’t someone’s primary residence for more than half of the year, that scales up exponentially with the number of such properties the owner owns, regardless of whether the owner is an individual or a corporation.

Take the money this generates and put it towards helping the homeless and low-income families.

Make it cheaper to put someone - anyone - in a home (even for free) than to keep it unoccupied.

Didn’t know that! I use an always-on VPN and I’ve never had issues with Catbox (but imgur blocks me), for what it’s worth.

Nope! It’s an image host, not a social media platform, which in my opinion is the best thing about it.

Catbox is basically what Imgur used to be before it went to absolute shit. You upload images, you can link to them. That’s it. You don’t need to create an account, but if you do, you can see everything you’ve uploaded. It’s free. Not really sure what more you can ask for in an image host.

Hot take: I think the president could be split into multiple offices that each have executive power over specific subsets of things. Having to choose one person whose stances we support means making concessions for some things in favor of others; having the office split into multiple would let us vote more closely in line with our actual views on a range of topics.

You might be interested in / amused by !the_pack@lemmy.world

It’s much more effective to do what they did than to intentionally instigate an attack. Don’t give Israel any leeway to say “Well we were justified because…”

You mean like ObamaCare, which they oppose largely on the basis of the name alone?

Kind of a nice counter-point to ‘the early bird gets the worm’.

If the chats are taking place on their platform, why wouldn’t they?

“Is Canada in the room with us right now?”

At this point is cheaper to be the house with full candy bars

Okay, complete tangent, but…

When my kid was still Trick-or-Treating age, I was walking around town with him and as it was getting a bit late, we came upon a house with a man sitting out front with a half-full box of full-size candy bars. He gave my kid one, and my kid asked if he could have another. Before I could scold him, the man said “Sure!” and gave him another, then followed up with “You can have the whole box, if you want…”

My kid was obviously ecstatic, and after a minute of chatting with him, it came out that his wife had told him he had to stay out there til they were all gone, and he wanted to go inside and watch whatever game was on.

So that’s how my kid ended up having the best Halloween of his life.

Taken completely at face value, this actually sounds great. However, the tariffs will ensure that the price of drugs not manufactured in the US skyrocket, so whatever benefit might have been gained is probably gone as a result.

Also, Trump is involved, so I’m inherently distrusting of it. I’m sure someone is making a lot of money off of this, it’s just a question of who. It’s certainly not being done purely to benefit families who need medication.