Right, and if you set up the system of elections in such a way that solving a problem makes it less likely you get elected, that problem won't get solved.

if you elect good people, you get good results. If you elect clowns, you get a circus.

I'm 48

How many fucking once in a lifetime crisis is this now ? 8? 9?

Good for him, and maybe that does give him that freedom, although it would depend on your state whether he would have that power or budget.

But that's not a solution for the whole country. Not every municipality is run by your friend.

I’m so sorry your mom went thru this. Mine died within 2 weeks of being diagnosed with cancer & while I was in shock at the time I’ve seen ppl linger years with it & im glad now she went relatively quickly.

My dad otoh died from a series of strokes & was paralysed from the neck down his last 2 years. To my shame he begged me to put a pillow over his face but I couldn’t do it. I was in my early 20s & had never killed anything. I feel awful I let him down but tbh I’m not sure I could do it now. I think him begging me to kill him is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with.

well he got over 80% of the vote the last two elections, and people like not having water mains breaking all the time.

Eh, you can't gaurantee you'll get re-elected, and the odds of that happening go way down when you dig up people's yards.

My buddy has been a township supervisor for over 20 years. So are two other guys on the board. I’m sure there’s a payoff to them for it.

They should have listened to their guy Zoltan!

>The footage contains no audio of the conversation between the two.

Without the audio this feels a bit pointless. She does step away from him two times - and frankly just because she shook his hand doesn't really mean jack if she thought it was de-escalating the situation. I think without audio it's fairly impossible to know what happened there.

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I am a local and fairly well educated on it as a lay person and parent. It is a complicated issue. HISD is extremely diverse and big. Some of the best high schools in the nation are in HISD and some that perpetually underperform are also in the district.

A lot of the issue comes down to what metrics are being measured and what can realistically be expected of a school that has all the problems of entrenched poverty and unstable living situations for the students’ families.

I do personally think there is a bit of politics involved because the state TEA is much more conservative than the district leadership in the large districts in the state. They made a set of school accountability metrics that I think most schools with high poverty issues would have is struggles meeting and waited for HISD to not pass the thresholds.

There is always debate about how both inflation and unemployment are calculated. People argue the reported numbers are wrong all the time, they have done for as long as I’ve been reading financial news, and probably some of those people are right. Sometimes unemployment numbers are retroactively revised after more information becomes available, that certainly has happened before.

But in terms of predicting monetary policy I’m not sure it matters. What matters is if the numbers the Fed has are above or below their target, not whether the numbers are 100% accurate, as far as their accuracy can even be measured.

Fascists gotta fascist.

Btw, something like 99% of homeowners are locked in to fixed interest rates between 3-6%. This is actually a problem. But there will not be any sort of housing market collapse because, after 2008, they kneecapped housing supply.

No one is building jack shit.

For anyone interested in this stuff though, seriously check out this guy's YouTube channel. Even go back a few months. I don't remember who shared this link with me, but I quietly thank them every day.

https://www.youtube.com/@clearvaluetax9382/videos

Is it true that there are problems with the way unemployment numbers have been presented, and that 2022 employment gains were counted in 2023 figures?

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Probably not this time actually. Mortgage rates largely follow the Fed rate and the Fed has precisely two goals (the “dual mandate”):

1. Keep inflation about 2%.

2. Keep unemployment about 4%.

That’s it. There’s nothing in the Fed mandate about protecting banks. Inflation is still at 6% yoy (yes that’s down from about 9% yoy a few months ago, but still too high) meanwhile unemployment is still very low at less than 4%. Thinking that the Fed will abandon its goal of price stability (aka 2% inflation) by suddenly cutting interest rates in order to save banks would be a very strange move. IF we see a massive unemployment spike as a result of bank failures then they would have a reason to cut rates. Until then, cooling inflation is a very high priority issue for both ordinary people and politicians so I don’t see a drastic rate cut before an even more painful unemployment report comes out.

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Trump and republicans repealed the Dodd Frank regulations that would have kept us from just such a collapse, again!

Would it be better to buy a home prior to a crash for lower cost and refi for lower interest?

I'm hoping there's financial incentive for the companies who have been snapping up homes to start selling them at a loss. If companies get tax breaks for sitting on empty homes so they can wait for prices to go back up, I'll be pretty pissed. They're manipulating the market for profit, and people are homeless.

From what I've been reading for the past couple years, someone should have stepped in and taken control to start winding things down a long time ago, softening the crash.