• Howdy
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    3 months ago

    Meanwhile in the usa… Our very own real estate fraudster with 91 felony charges is the pick of 50% of the country to be president.

    That was bizarre to type. I can’t believe this is reality.

    • Ghostface
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      83 months ago

      Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

      I can’t say nothing will happen to them as I thought, nothing would happen to Trump and here we are.

      I also have a biy more respect for giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. If Trump would of been stopped before his presidency, due to all of the reason any previous candidate would of been disqualified. We wouldn’t be here either.

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

        I keep reading and rereading this “sentence” and I’ve come up empty. Can you clarify?

        • Ghostface
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          22 months ago

          Sure! In summary the political process would of discarded Trump as a candidate before reaching office. For reference there was a politician who dropped from running because he had a weirdish yell played across the air.

          Then you have Trump in office, having never divested from his companies, from day one Trump was in violation of a crime. Now here is where the rope comes into play. Trump was playing the gambit of not bring charged while in office which allowed him to believe he could keep delaying the clock.

          Now due to his corruption, he has taken down the GOP, that party is slowly imploding, judges, politicians he has exposed the entire grossness of the system.

          So short rope, no insurrection maybe… Long rope and it leave a wider wake of destruction. RNC downfall, GOP splitting up…

  • @[email protected]
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    663 months ago

    The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.

    Wow, when your fraud starts being measured in “percentage of GDP” you know you got too greedy.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

      That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

      From a BBC article

  • @[email protected]
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    563 months ago

    I think people like her deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no crime, no matter how severe, deserves a death penalty.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      Nah, make the rich afraid again. We can talk red rose pacifism once the ultrawealthy are out of the picture.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 months ago

        But when the death penalty is available, it’s not just the ultra wealthy who suffer. It’s far easier for the ultra wealthy to use their resources to frame someone they don’t like as a murderer or something and get that person executed. It’s even easier for the state to do that if they are corrupt enough. I’d much rather not give the state the right to sentence anyone to death at any point. Make these ultra rich criminals go to prison for the rest of their lives, make it unpardonable too.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          I’d much rather not give the state the right to sentence anyone to death at any point.

          Not every country has a genocidal fascist regime as a government. Viet Nam is definitely not one of those.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 months ago

              That’s a pretty sloppy “you’re right but i’m still right” answer. Of course that’s not going to happen, they’re communists. It’s liberal governments that end up going fascist.

              • @[email protected]
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                42 months ago

                USSR collapsed and looks at Russia now. Just because they are communists now doesn’t mean they won’t become fascist in the future.

    • @[email protected]
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      -113 months ago

      I think there are certainly crimes that deserve the death penalty (think CP type crimes). Just get those people out of society tbh, but this is just my opinion.

      The only problem I have is with 100% certainly. You would have to be certain, or very very close to absolute certainty, that you have the right person who committed the crime.

      • @[email protected]
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        303 months ago

        If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.

        • @[email protected]
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          -63 months ago

          It is a deterrent. For instance, we wouldn’t have insurrectionists working in the highest levels of government if we actually had effective laws and enforcement.

          • @[email protected]
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            82 months ago

            It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

            It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

            The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.

            • @[email protected]
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              02 months ago

              I think your logic is flawed. Obviously the death penalty is a serious deterrent. It’s not going to stop everybody, but it will most certainly stop many people.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 months ago

                I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.

                • @[email protected]
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                  02 months ago

                  I’m just talking about deterrence, it was obvious that you were reaching tenuous conclusions based on your dislike of the death penalty.

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there’s no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they’ve served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)

          On the other hand, people don’t get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there’s no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.

          The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it’s not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.

          • @[email protected]
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            143 months ago

            Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.

            About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it’s true… But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don’t deserve to be executed, like Snowden… Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

            As for escaping prison, it’s already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it’s definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn’t be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner’s location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don’t have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn’t be worth it.

            • @[email protected]
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              -43 months ago

              Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil’s Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don’t want to be prisoners.

              I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there’s not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn’t be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You’d also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you’d have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn’t been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

              I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it’s currently mostly applied to people that don’t have enough money to get better legal counsel.

              I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I’d take execution.

              • @[email protected]
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                42 months ago

                Yes, people do escape, but it’s extremely rare. I’m far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.

                Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.

          • @xthexder
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            3 months ago

            The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.

            Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can’t.

            • @[email protected]
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              -53 months ago

              I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that’s eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can’t be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a “confession”. I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn’t get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.

              I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out–like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he’s finally safe–is terrifying.

            • @[email protected]
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              -12 months ago

              That’s an interesting interpretation.

              Yes, I think that Roger Stone should be executed, so that if Trump is re-elected he can’t pardon him.

  • @[email protected]
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    293 months ago

    I don’t believe these things happen because of great work or investigations, she must have stepped on someone else’s toes or something, that’s the only way influential people go down…

    • @[email protected]
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      483 months ago

      There’s your answer:

      Her actions “not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organizations but also push SCB (Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank) into a state of special control; eroding people’s trust in the leadership of the Party and State,”

      • @[email protected]
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        223 months ago

        Is this stepping on someone’s toes? “If we don’t hold rich people accountable, people will think we don’t hold rich people accountable”.

        • @[email protected]
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          -12 months ago

          And this scream of, we’ll make a barbaric and extreme example out them for violating our god, money, and nobody will question our resolve and ability to catch the 99.99% of those who get away with it.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 months ago

            What are you talking about? The money is the combined output of the workers of Vietnam. It’s people’s money, they have the right to protect it from parasites. The people’s government went after a capitalist to protect the people’s livelihood.

            I don’t think the death penalty is ever right, but acting like this person wasn’t the worst type of criminal, and that the legal system didn’t enact the will of the people here is wrong.

            • @[email protected]
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              -12 months ago

              Liars are not the worst kind of crininals, by a wide margin, and this particular type of liar was enabled by the greed of others as well as that of the state. Nobody loses “percentages of the gdp” on their own. This barbarism has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with the butchers of the state trying to save face and fulfill their promess of infinite vengeance against those who would embarrass it.

              The Earth needs cleansing from the statism infection, today’s most wretched mental illness.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 months ago

                Not liars, criminals with tens of thousands of victims. If you don’t want the state of Vietnam to conduct executions then they need to fall out of favour with the people. This is an issue of societal values. If instead just the state felt embarrassed, then carrying out a punishment abhorred by the people would only embarrass them more.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 months ago

                  It’s a killer state, the people will have to do what it says. Or else… The state is only embarrassed to have its deadly coercive deterrence disrespected.

                  The solution to that is easy, state sanctionned executions. What better way to keep tge population in line and trust your the one and only strong man they crave so much.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Doing a multi billion dollar realestate fraud, in a semi-communist “Socialist Oriented Market Economy”…

    …yeah the penalty is gonna be on the steep side. Landlords, rent seekers, and fraudsters aren’t looked upon nicely anywhere, but particularly so in a country with that relationship to communism.

    Landlords aren’t generally considered communal minded. Fraud isn’t good for the community, it’s not done for the collective good.

    The immune system of the masses has weeded out the what was going on here, and will deal with it via putting the perpetrator to death. Making sure this outrageous and damaging conduct will not continue or be encouraged.

    It’s a tough call, and they’re making it.

      • Sentient Loom
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        3 months ago

        is there a way to approach being a landlord in an ethical and community-minded way?

        One landlord may be more or less “ethical and community minded” than another, but being a landlord is 100% about profiting from somebody else’s precariousness. The best you can say is, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” I appreciate a landlord who fixes the broken pipes and doesn’t totally gouge me… but that always feels like Stockholm Syndrome.

        Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

        I don’t see what difference that would make. They still get to set the price, and you can either take it or leave it.

        I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

        I suspect that this number is extremely low.

        How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

        Easily with far (far far far) fewer landlords.

        It’s genuinely ridiculous to paint “rental homes” as some boutique service offered as a choice to home-owners who have money for a house but just don’t want the “commitment” (?!?!?!?!?) of not throwing a huge portion of your money away every month. Absurd.

        I don’t hate small landlords. We all have to betray humanity to avoid being homeless. We work at unscrupulous companies, because what other kind of companies are usually hiring? But we don’t have to contort ourselves to the point of breaking every single bone in our bodies to morally justify profiting from the unfair precariousness of people terrified of homelessness.

        • @[email protected]
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          63 months ago

          Yeah, the short of it is if you are a landlord and you’re not undermining your own industry by encouraging tenants to become owners of their own personal property, then you’re not community minded in the socialist (own the means of production) sense. There are exceptions, like one case where a rapper bought a poor neighborhood but did so to keep rent hikes and evictions from happening, arguably giving those families more stability so they have a chance to build family wealth.

          • Adlach
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            12 months ago

            I’m not sure how a house is different from an apartment in this regard. It doesn’t need fed or anything, you can just go on vacation if you want.

        • @[email protected]
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          03 months ago

          The one issue I would raise with your analysis is that if things were very different (like all people who wanted a home had one) a second home rented out not to the desperate but people in a transitional state could be a benefit to the community. Think college students who are attending school somewhere they do not plan to live long term, and who prefer not to live in a dormitory. Or people who are staying for a few months in another city for their work or visiting family, where a hotel would be prohibitively expensive.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            Interestingly enough, something like 86% of Vietnamese people own their own homes…

            In part it’s because 70% of the population are farmers, and if you live in a rural area and pass a test on raising crops the government will just assign you a plot to farm.

            I imagine home ownership is also very high in Japan, where they’ve had a negative interest rate and deflation for 25 years. Their housing bubble burst with their aged population explosion and the total population being in decline.

      • Fire Witch
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        3 months ago

        It’s a simple question. Are you taking away a home that could be bought and lived in by another family, for your own financial benefit?

        If yes, then i have a French friend I’d like you to meet

          • @[email protected]
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            62 months ago

            You are looking at ethics and morality from an individualistic perspective, not a systemic perspective. People opposed to landlords are more concerned with the latter. This is an insignificant edge case needed to construct a situation where the individual and social ethics diverge and has little relevance to policy decisions.

          • Fire Witch
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            2 months ago

            I wouldn’t say either is entirely ethical, but the second example is way more ethical than the first. If you buy a house to rent, it doesn’t really matter where the house is, you’re still preventing a family from having a stable home and taking it off the market for your own greed. With the second, at least you’re building housing.

      • @[email protected]
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        Would a community-minded individual buying a second home in their own neighborhood to rent out cause them to become less community-minded?

        Probably, because it would probably cause them to become entitled, or have an overly endowed sense of entitlement or control over the area (by valorisation of the owning more of it). They’d probably bring it up whenever they could, especially at council meetings as of its an act of charity when it’s still rent seeking.

        That sense of entitlement is generally termed “being a Karen” these days, and is a Common phenomena among financially sucessful liberals

        Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

        What? Rubbing the renters face in the fact that they’ve got them paying off a mortgage that the renter could probably afford themselves if they only had the CAPITAL outlay for a down payment on the place they’re now forced to rent?

        No, the ethical move would be to place the house in the renters name proportionally as they pay it off - because they’re the ones actually paying the mortgage. Making the false claim of “oh look how much of YOUR MONEY this is costing me” isn’t some how more ethical.

        This is the nature of capitalism, it privileges people with CAPITAL. Rubbing the renters nose in that fact doesn’t suddenly make it ethical. Most renters already know they’re paying off someone else’s mortgage - or in some cases second or third mortgage - that’s part of the whole problem. That’s what “rent seeking” is, the creation of a false middle man who collects rent without doing the work of the actual person charged with paying.

        You can’t make it ethical simply by telling the victim that that’s what you’re doing. No.

        A mugging doesn’t become more ethical if the mugger explains what they’re doing and how much of the person’s cash they’re gonna spend on what.

        but I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

        That’s not a thing. You’ve made something up, and it sounds like you’re feeling a suitable guilt for your rent seeking behaviour.

        People WANT the commitment, security, and stability of owning their own homes, they just can’t find a bank to offer the Capital outlay, or can’t find an available property within their means because HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY. That the wealthy wittingly or unwittingly use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages. So you need to get real on this issue.

        How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

        By banks determining who can have a mortgage by who has a healthy record of paying rent on time. If someone is consistently the source of the cost of the mortgage THEY should be trust worthy enough for their own similar mortgage. That’s just common sense.

        But instead HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY that the wealthy (wittingly or unwittingly) use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages… It’s rent seeking behaviour.

        Would it be through something like cities mandating a certain ratio of SFH’s to apartments/duplexes, then only allowing landlords to own and rent apartments? Although that seems like it would conflict with community-mindedness.

        Yeah, seems like something that just privileges the moneyed Capitalist class.

        More on topic, yeah. Personal feelings on the death penalty aside, this is what a country not bowing to the billionaire class looks like. As an American, it’s honestly refreshing to see someone with that much money held to actual accountability for their actions.

        Yes, it doesn’t happen so much in America because America is a Capitalist oriented feudalist system designed with poverty as a feature of the system. Gotta have someone for the upper class people to exploit.

        I’d love to tell you different because it’s clear you have a conscience even though you’re living your part in the system… But I can’t.

        Thanks for trying to make an “Ethical Capitalism” but there can seldom be such a thing (it’s a bit of a contradiction in terms). Australia is trying to get a thing called HAFF (the housing future fund) up and running, where building unions pay for starting the construction of new housing but the housing is still sold on the open market of Capitalism as a commodity to whoever has the largest Capital outlay… So yeah.

        The UK has more co-op housing, where subsidized housing is owned and ran by the tenants… but it’s still not quite ethical and pretty hard to get into because it’s not a large program.

        Congrats on being a home owner (I assume). Maybe you got lucky and under other circumstances you’d be on the other (less pleasant) side of the equation.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            No, I’m not really fine with banks profiting of mortgages, but I am more fine with it than I am private individuals. This is for a couple of reasons:

            Banks are easier to regulate.

            Banks are more directly related to the life of a currency, they’re responsible for the buying of government bonds which enables the money supply to be increased.

            A disparity between the wealth of banks and the wealth of private individuals is already an stable established norm.

            It’s not common for banks to be owned by private individuals.

            Banks can be owned by unions.

            Land is a finite resource, and I’m not sure anyone has cracked how best to manage it. I like some of what Vietnam does, where if you live in a rural area and can prove that you know how to raise crops (via a standard test) the government will allocate you a plot of farmland to farm. This has resulted in 70% of their population being farmers, and 86% of the population owning their own homes. So ultimately I think the state and probably a state bank, or state land bank, should probably be responsible for managing mortgages.

            The word mortgage actually breaks down to death’s pledge by the way. It’s the kind of thing designed to take someone a lifetime to pay off.

            It’s all pretty dark, and really I think housing should be a human right. I think if people were responsible for their own homes we’d see better upkeep, and that to some degree housing, shelter, and land should be seen as a nexus point between the citizen and the nation which is made up of the geographical area parceled out and built on to live in.

            The less public housing is made, and the more like a private speculator’s market it becomes, the greater wealth disparity we’ll see. Housing is tied up with homelessness which is a key indicator of how in decline citizen’s feel their society to be. Leaving that up to the free market is insane, and represents just how “sold out” our lives can be.

            It’s part of maintaining the physical, financial and mental health of the population. We shouldn’t leave it up to profiteers.

            I can understand having a death’s pledge to the state. I can’t understand paying off someone else’s death pledge with your life, so that they can buy more and more houses and do more of the same. What are these, soul collector’s?

            Societies with a narrower wealth disparity (a smaller gap between the richest and poorest) tend to be better off, more unified, more humanitarian, more democratically capable, and less tolerant of injustices. Making sure the rental system doesn’t become a speculative investment market is an important aspect of a society’s success, empathy, and of the quality of life and peace of mind of citizens.

            Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.

            • borari
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              22 months ago

              Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.

              It’s all good, and thank you for your response. You really gave me a lot to chew on, I’ve never really considered a lot of what you brought up about bank owned mortgages, specially the bit about regulation and pre established wealth disparity.

  • @[email protected]
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    222 months ago

    I’m usually not fond of the death penalty, but these are the kind of people it should be reserved for.

  • Lad
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    192 months ago

    I don’t support the death penalty, but I do support harsh punishment for this kind of massive scale fraud.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 months ago

      Completely agree, the death penalty isn’t necessary, but I am glad of the message this sends to some rich folk. Probably mostly Vietnamese ones, but still.