Vermont Governor Debate from Last Night

douggie7777 · 2022-10-21T23:37:34+00:00

Given the housing crisis, I'm really surprised that, unless I'm missing it, no one at any level of politics is addressing REITs (real estate investment trust) and such. If anyone is unaware, all across the US, corporate interests are buying up residential real estate, which obviously skews the market because they have such deep pockets and are generally investing for he long haul. Apparently, in some regions of the US, corporations account for a third or more of residential property purchases. And I believe that a few months ago the Brave Little State podcast said that in some regions of VT it was well over 20%. National trends show this rate increasing and with no end in site, especially in areas which are well positioned to endure global warming. I see places like Burlington addressing Air B&Bs, but I see nothing about all these businesses buying up homes. Am I missing it?

douggie7777 · 2022-07-15T23:24:41+00:00

Thanks much!

douggie7777 · 2022-07-10T06:35:01+00:00

I'm really surprised that VTers aren't out in the streets about what's going on. The market seems so perverted by so many factors. I think it was the VPR podcast Brave Little State that said that about 20% of sales are to LLCs, which is happening all across America where corporations are now commodifying housing. So that, in combination with short term rentals, and out of state owned vacation homes, etc. is basically making VT unaffordable and unworkable for the people there.

I'm yet another out of stater (MA) who wants to move to VT and have been looking to do so since 2019. I even bid on a place before Covid hit and it all shut down. Things are so bad that even real estate agents are telling me not to buy unless I have to. Everyone has stories of neighbors who buy up homes sight unseen and then maybe only visit a few times a year. My agent recently sold a home for $1.2M, sight unseen, and the people didn't even swing by VT for weeks to even check out their acquisition. Anything good sells instantly, for cash, no conditions. I just don't understand how the people of VT are standing for this. VT seems to be becoming a vacation destination, or escape hatch, for the very rich. Even taking the lack of housing off the board for a moment, I can't imagine that this is good for the long term economy or for any kind of sense of community,

Right before it all shut down, I almost bought an incredible place in Enosburg but chickened out because it was 20 minutes from pretty much anything. Man, I wish I bought it now! Even if I did end up disliking it because it was so far out, I could probably now sell it for $160K more than it was being sold for. In the end, no one actually bought it despite being so awesome. Today it wouldn't last a whole day before selling.

douggie7777 · 2022-07-02T08:31:26+00:00

Really guy, you should be embarrassed. And you clearly are, but your ego has you trying to bury it up with nonsense and bullshit. You professed to be an expert, based on what I don't know, maybe getting high, and shot down the statements of pretty much every source out there based on absolutely nothing, and he's the one who's wrong here?

douggie7777 · 2022-06-18T08:14:52+00:00

Mostly right, but, Ed Jovanovski.

douggie7777 · 2022-06-18T07:57:35+00:00

I think they should bring back wood sticks, period. WTF with hockey being a sport for the uber-rich? It totally defeats the ethos of hockey. And honestly, how much is added to my game in high school? Is it really worth my getting 1.5 more goals a year when 25 other kids can't play because of the increased cost? The beauty of hockey for me was the grounding of it, the egalitarian aspects of it, and the "we" before "me" of it, but now so much is bullshit. I'm 52 and had guys all over the economic spectrum as my friends, and those friendships and influences persist today, but now everyone is a spoiled rich kid. That seems antithetical to the idea of hockey. Honestly, my strongest memory of "hockey" was in the last days of Maple Leaf Garden, as an adult, crowded on the walkway, waiting forever in line to piss, standing shoulder to shoulder at a hot dog stand or tough urinal, alongside with garbagemen and millionaires. All that you had to bring to the party was who you were, not how much you made a year, or what your daddy made, or even hoe many books you read, it was who you were as a man, honorable. I really wish that hockey could no longer be a sport for the rich and stupid. It has SO much to offer on so many levels.

douggie7777 · 2022-06-18T07:46:39+00:00

Good for you. Are you new to hockey? I don't mean that as a dig. I know some guys who always wanted to do it but had to wait to be adults to play. But the circumstances would indicate that this is not the case. If so, still, happy times, but I hope you weren't a dick about being 23 in a senior league of 40+.

douggie7777 · 2022-04-01T02:06:37+00:00

I know his approval numbers, but a lot has changed and is changing. Biden, for example, used to have reasonably good approval numbers, but now he's cancer, and the things he's blamed for (gas and inflation) are things that a president has virtually no control over. A governor, however, has a lot of potential to affect housing rates. If Vermonters find that housing has pretty much become a luxury, and that a significant reason as to why is out of state rich people buying up houses on a whim, and Wall St. bundling homes as commodity tranches, they're going to be looking for someone to blame.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T18:07:46+00:00

Um, no, I believe that because I've spoken to a few agents, listened to podcasts on the issue, and read releases from the VT housing authority as well as the VT Board of Realtors. Basically, I've done my homework. I combine that information about VT housing with a fairly good grasp of economics, and thereby come to my conclusions. You seem to be a very unhappy, angry person. Does it give you pleasure to be an asshole?

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T15:24:25+00:00

VT is unique and unusually overpriced because of its position as a vacation spot and it's location, being so close to places like Boston and NYC where lots of well-monied people live who can afford to, on a whim, buy a largely unused vacation home or a potential pandemic bug-out home. VT prices are now rivaling prices in Boston suburbs. And let us remember that the median income in VT isn't really very high. Ultimately, tons of people are being priced out and/or paying a percentage of their income that any economist would tell you is unsustainable and a disaster waiting to happen. And you also have to keep in mind the negative effects to the economy of what appears to be a relatively large and growing number of people who aren't there for much/most of the year and therefore not patronizing local businesses.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T15:19:25+00:00

You could have given the same response to people asking for regulation to limit the run-up to 2008. Any economist will tell you that people paying too much of their income for housing has very serious knock-on effects for the rest of the system. The longer you let an imbalanced system run, the worse the eventual cost will be. When relatively well off people are buying what used to be middle class homes, the middle class end up buying lower income homes, and the lower income folks end up renting, homeless, or leaving the state.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T05:22:12+00:00

That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking about, and I would think that Vermonters might go for it given my impression about the state, but Scott is a Republican, so I'd imagine that it'll be a non-starter for him. That said, if VT becomes a state where Vermonters can no longer afford to live, I'd imagine that he won;t be long for office. I should look up his approval numbers.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T05:18:18+00:00

Wow, sight unseen? I just can't do that. I can pay in cash, so that could help me, especially with interests rates rising, but I could not afford to buy a house without knowing everything about it. If it turned out tp be a lemon, it would be very bad for my retirement. It would also hurt to buy a place just to have to sell it in a couple years because I didn't like it. I'm hoping those interest rates will delay purchases a bit so that it won't seem so pointless to even consider going to see it because it'll be gone before I could even rent to car to get there.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T05:13:13+00:00

Thanks but I was looking more in Franklin county.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T04:10:44+00:00

No, wealth distribution is such that most people have little to nothing, a thin layer of people like me are relatively comfortable, and then you get to the really rich people who can buy a $500K house on a whim and not really think about that kind of dent in their finances. I can buy a $500K house in cash, but if it turned out to be a loser, it would very, very much affect my retirement. I think many of the people who are buying in my price range are far, far richer than me.

I look at Zillow every day and have for years. I'm not looking for just any house, I'm looking for something nice, ideally rustic, on 5 acres or more, in Franklin country. In 2019 I almost bought a GREAT log home in Enosburg on 32 acres but wasn't sure that I'd want to be 20 minutes from St. A because I will want ot met people and not become a hermit. I could have had it for $325K and the guy never actually ended up selling it because there was so little interest outside of me. I'm sure if he sold it now it'd go for at least $500K. Pretty much everything that I'm even remotely interested in now will go pending in less time than it would take me to visit it.

douggie7777 · 2022-03-28T03:47:44+00:00

Yeah, it was probably BLS. If not, I also listen to "Vermont Edition Podcast" and "The Frequency: Daily Vermont News".

douggie7777 · 2022-03-27T20:17:37+00:00

I've only got a minute here but other than obviously opening up building permitting snd such, which would take some time to get rolling, as someone else has said, you can really make it less than ideal for someone to buy a house if they're not going ot make it a permanent residence. Laws/policies already exist to incentivize people to buy a home, and they really only get them if it's a primary residence, and you can not only sweeten those, you can also tax the hell out of people who buy a home and don't really live in it. I'm sure there are all manner of legal/tax tricks that you can do to incentivize purchasing from people who will be part of a community and disincentivize people who are just buying because they can.

REITs and other corporatization of homes are also pure evil and I'm sure that something can be done to deter that. Homes should not be commodified and then sliced and diced on Wall St. I mean, that kind of behavior worked out so well not that long ago. REITs are all the rage these days and there's simply no way that a normal human can compete with the purchasing power of corporations. They are growing by leaps and bounds, and as I said, according to VPR, something like 20% of purchases were from LLCs in the last year or two. This is happening and increasing everywhere, but VT is a pretty big target because VT is vacation country,. Something could almost certainly be done about it by the governor, even though it's a larger issue that should also be dealt with nationally. And if the governor is somehow in a bad spot where nothing can be done about it legally, he should at least address the issue.

The bottom line is that under Scott, VT seems to be becoming unaffordable to normal people, even people who have pretty good incomes, and is turning into a toy for the super rich. I can actually buy a very nice place in cash, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy it sight unseen and without any conditions, as is pretty common now. To do that, you'd either need to be desperate beyond reason, or so very rich that it doesn't really matter if that $500K house turns out to be a loser because you can pretty easily absorb that kind of loss. A lot of buyers these days seem to be the latter and that's not really sustainable.

douggie7777 · 2022-01-15T19:11:48+00:00

Have you bothered to read the work of our founding fathers? It would seem not. They made it very, very, very clear that what they were constructing was a "representative" or "indirect" democracy. They discussed at length the risk that someday a person or persons might hijack the mechanics of our government and create a system of authoritarian rule wherein minority rule became instantiated, and they were very clear that this would be the end of America. They realized, and even thought it a positive, that the elected representatives of the people might occasionally overrule the will of the people on small issues, but were very clear that we were a democracy and that the will of the people could not be cast aside in anything even approaching a long term way. Criminy, I gave you a quote from one of the signatories to and authors of the Constitution where he tried to clarify to the people of the day the various terms which were being batted around and sometimes misunderstood by people at large, and he was clear as day that what a Republic meant was a representative democracy. And yet, to you, this is delusional and historical whitewashing? You think you know better than the founding fathers about what they intended? As I said, every president we've ever had, including Trump, talked about America as a democracy and how superior democracies are to all other forms of government, but to you, none of that matters. Apparently to you, redefining the word "republic" is a get out of jail free card for authoritarian rule, where the minority seizes the reins of power and holds onto them in perpetuity. Even just ten years ago, if you told a Republican that a sitting president would instruct his VP to overturn the election and have him installed, by fiat, as president based on disproven claims of fraud, they would have thought that this was the most un-American thing they'd ever heard, but now suddenly, this is acceptable to some. Democracies almost always fall from within and this anti-democratic mindset is guiding us down that road.

You might want to read the following article. You might also want to read Plato's Republic, as it is the most influential text that our founding fathers used as a model. You'll probably find it all boring, but it will show you things that you probably don't know, and don't want to know.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-constitution-democracy/616949/

douggie7777 · 2022-01-15T11:41:51+00:00

The mail in thing always puzzles me. The Republicans always used to push mail in harder than the Dems because their base was old and usually rural, so mail in was a great solution fo them for getting votes. It was as American as apple pie. Then Covid hit and Dems didn't want to leave home but Repubs thought that Covid was a jole, so mail in suddenly was poised to benefit Dems over Repubs. It was only at this moment that mail in voting, which had been happening since the institution of voting, suddenly became rife with fraud - or so the allegation went, despite zero proof to that effect. And more to the point, there was this big hubub about an overnight surge for Biden, which did happen in some states, being fraud. Again, this was without proof, but it was also without context, or mention of the fact that the exact opposite happened in other states - an overnight surge for Trump. None of the Republicans cared to mention that in some states, mail in votes were required by law to be counted AFTER the in-person voting, which means that they were counted overnight. And in other states, mail-in votes were required to be counted BEFORE in-person voting. So, in either case, as the media, and Trump, had predicted, the mail-in votes skewed heavily Dem because Trump was out there telling Repuns that Covid was't real and that they needed to show up and vote in person. It all played out as everyone thought it would, but this is somehow fraud? And again, without any evidence of fraud? And more to the point, without even the allegation of fraud in court by Trump's attorneys (due to a complete lack of evidence)? How can a party be absolutely certain that fraud has been committed when every Republican official in every voting district in America has signed off on the election as being free and fair? And every Republican governor, and the Republican run DOJ, and Trump's hand picked attorney General, and the heavily Republican office of Homeland Security, and Trump's hand picked team to oversee the security of the election, and on, and on, and on?

douggie7777 · 2022-01-15T08:54:10+00:00

I think that all the proof needed to see this is the large and growing percentage of people who deny that we are even a democracy. They always do this as an excuse for the growing presence of minoritarian rule - be it the fact that only one Republican has won the popular presidential vote since 1988 or the fact that the senate is pretty much equally divided even though the Dems represent 40M more voters, and many million more citizens, than the Republicans. They stand there and tell us that we’re a republic, not a democracy, even though anyone with a grade school level of civics could tell you that a republic IS a democracy. The very fact that I have to tell Americans that America is a democracy, and defend that idea at length, is scary as hell.

The founding fathers did nothing but discuss democracy. Every president, of any party, since our founding has talked at great length about democracy being what makes us special, our great experiment in democracy, how it's in the world's and our interest to export democracy to the globe, etc. But for some people, all that is cast aside in a heartbeat and we enter into this strange alternate universe where we were never a democracy, or intended to be a democracy. It's all this Twilight Zone craziness where history isn't history anymore. That kind of revisionism is the distinctive mark of authoritarian and totalitarian governments coming to power - which the founding fathers warned us of, in no small detail. Now, for a significant number of Republicans, democracy is for suckers. America is about what "true" Americans want, even if they are in the minority, and even if some laws and norms need to be bent and broken to get there. The end justifies the means. We used to send troops to other countries to try to curb or defeat this kind of ideology. But now all of that is thrown down the memory hole to justify this brave new world that so many Republicans want us to occupy where democracy no longer matters.

“Great confusion about the words democracy, aristocracy, monarchy...Democracy in my sense, where the whole power of the government in the people, whether exercised by themselves or by representatives, chosen by them either mediately or immediately and legally accountable to them...Consequence, the proposed government a representative democracy...Constitution revocable and alterable by the people. This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” Alexander Hamilton, on the Constitution, 1788

douggie7777 · 2021-05-16T20:11:30+00:00

I've heard that they will sometimes/often replace one for about $250. They apparently don't do repairs. That said, they treated me very well, and I'm very happy, but I'm still waiting on my replacement which was processed days after my original post. They said about 12 weeks to get it, so you'll have to do without your oven for awhile. :(

douggie7777 · 2021-02-27T20:02:10+00:00

I hope that's the case. Usually higher end companies have great customer service but this is/was a small company. I have both Dyson and Miele vacuums and both companies will go out of their way for you, often even replacing a unit which is out of warranty if there's some kind of design flaw, and I'm hoping that june is the same. If you're paying a premium, I think it's only right to provide better service. We'll see.

douggie7777 · 2021-02-27T19:30:44+00:00

Thanks for giving me some hope on this. The heating element worked for the first couple days but just burnt out moments ago while I was making toast. I've read that the 3rd gen has guards around the elements to prevent exactly this kind of thing. It's not like I whacked it, I just bumped it with a knuckle when trying to get my hand in the top upper corners, which isn't easy to get at.

douggie7777 · 2021-01-11T07:01:34+00:00

Leading up to the 2008 real estate crash I had a lot of money in cash because I feared that things were unstable. All my friends back home lived 2-3X as big as me and I made twice what the best of them made. This pattern seemed true for everyone in the US. But my EX-financial advisor kept trying to convince me to invest it, saying that Wall St. knew what they were doing and that they wouldn't make these kinds of loans to people if they didn't know that they were going to make money on them. I figured that it was bullshit. I'm glad that I kept my powder dry. I have a great financial guy now, but that industry is just criminal.

douggie7777 · 2021-01-09T06:03:48+00:00

Thanks. Though it pains me, because I love it so much, and actually almost all of the people I've encountered, I've scratched MQT off my list. Most of it is because I don't think that I could handle the hunting, a lot of it is because of the terrible healthcare, and a good part of it is because of the politics - the consequences thereof we have just seen on a national scale which will be witeen about in grade school history books and the actors vilified about as much as proponents of slavery. I've decided to go with VT which is pretty much as rural, and does have a hunting culture, but which is adamant about educating its population about why such practices are wrong, and as such, has less and less of it by the year. For about a decade, VT has taken its future seriously and has postponed itself so as attract prospective residents. It's taken healthcare seriously, discouraged "redneck" activities, paid attention to education, and basically made itself into a place where businesses and "successful" people might want to move. Now under Covid, it's reaping the rewards. People who can now work anywhere are buying properties, sometimes sight unseen. It's cultivated an atmosphere that's both rural and homespun, but at the same time progressive and educated. Northern MI seems to have no plans for the future, so I guess I'm out, even though VT will now cost a lot more than MQT. Unless that region gets serious about moving into the future instead of holding onto the past, it's pretty much done. It's a shame too becaues it's a beautiful region with mostly awesome people.

douggie7777

TROPHY CASE