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Created
Tue, 05/12/2023 - 01:00
That’s one explanation That Statista chart is from May 10, 2022. A followup from Oct 18, 2023 reports the market has cooled somewhat since last year. Nevertheless: While house prices have continuously grown in recent years, incomes have not followed at the same pace. That means that for aspiring homeowners, purchasing a home has become increasingly unaffordable. In a survey among people actively looking to buy a home, one in three millennials cited the high house prices as the main barrier to homeownership. Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise and has forced the Federal Reserve to introduce a gradual increase in interest rates, leading to a double increase in the cost of borrowing. As a result, homebuyer sentiment plummeted, Americans across all age groups agreeing that the current time was not a good time to buy a home. Home ownership is still one of the main ways Americans build wealth. If I were Gen Z, I’d be pissed too. The Redfin chart above is also from summer 2022.
Created
Tue, 05/12/2023 - 01:00

To help celebrate our twenty-fifth year of being on the information superhighway, we have reached out to some of our former columnists for check-ins and updates. Today’s featured columnist, Susan Schorn, is a former Column Contest winner. She wrote sixty-one essays of Bitchslap, her column about women’s rights and self-defense, from 2009 to 2015. We’re pleased to have her back on our pages with her sixty-second installment.

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Bitchslap debuted in 2009 as “a column about women and fighting,” because they say write what you know, and what I knew was that I always seemed to be fighting—for safety, or autonomy, or simply to not be pushed around—and most of those fights were related to my identity as a woman. The column’s premise was apparently novel enough to sustain an audience: that fighting is not without its costs, but it works surprisingly well against bullies, and even when it doesn’t work, it’s preferable to helplessness. Sometimes it’s even fun.

Created
Tue, 05/12/2023 - 00:01

1. “Go back to sleep, let me drive, let me think, let me figure it out.”

2. “I can’t get around the river in front of me.”

3. “I don’t know, the cookies make me nervous.”

4. “I’m so sorry, but the motorcade will have to go around me this time.”

5. “Why did you listen to that man? That man’s a balloon.”

6. “Karen, I know where we are and where we’re going to be. How can you trust this stupid app more than you can trust me?”

7. “I’d rather walk all the way home right now than to spend one more second in this place.”

8. “So blame it on me. I really don’t care.”

9. “Turn off the light. I don’t want to die tonight.”

10. “It’s half your fault so half forgive me.”

11. “Stop backseat driving for once in your life.”

12. “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”

13. “Can’t you find a way? You are in this too.”

Created
Mon, 04/12/2023 - 12:52
On November 27, 2023, the Economic Affairs Committee of the British House of Lords completed their inquiry into the question – Bank of England: how is independence working? – by releasing their 1st Report after taking evidence for several months – Making an independent Bank of England work better. The report is interesting because it…
Created
Mon, 04/12/2023 - 10:00
Heidi Przbyla at Politico reports on yet more degradation of the Supreme Court: Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling. Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.” The argument was echoed in dozens of amicus briefs supporting Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Seven months before the decision, the argument was featured in an article on the web page of the conservative legal network, the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chair.
Created
Mon, 04/12/2023 - 09:32

In 1981, India’s post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase “Solidarity with the Palestinian people.” That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country’s catastrophic war on Gaza. It’s a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar “problems” they’re trying to “solve.” Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a “genocide in the making”). Meanwhile, India’s Hindu... Read more

Source: The Israel-India-U.S. Triangle appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Mon, 04/12/2023 - 08:30
If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll. “I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday. Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.
Created
Mon, 04/12/2023 - 07:00
DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law. “Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.” He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring. I can’t wait. I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.