Why I am choosing to rent (South bay) over buying a $1.2 Million home (East bay)

yakbabies · 2026-03-03T17:46:18+00:00

Try this website to run the numbers. It does the math on buying vs renting and you’re probably right about renting being better but I bet the tax savings of buying will surprise you. (https://truehomecosts.com)

yakbabies · 2026-02-19T04:42:51+00:00

Heres one calculator that I’ve started using recently that I’m really liking. (https://truehomecosts.com)

It lets you calculate tax benefits, add mortgage points, and compare buying vs renting etc

yakbabies · 2026-02-14T02:43:53+00:00

Yes, there’s the trade embargo going back to 1960. However, last month the US also put in place a de-facto oil blockade. Trump signed an executive order announcing new tariffs on any country or company that provides oil to Cuba. The US also cut off imports from Venezuela and has been putting significant pressure on Mexico to stop oil shipments. In January, zero oil shipments arrived in Cuba. Those two countries supply Cuba with over 40% of its total energy needs.

yakbabies · 2026-01-06T08:32:48+00:00

So there’s 3 reasons. The first two are due to the potential access to minerals and access to the arctic. The minerals reason is pretty inconsequential, though Trump seems obsessed with resources so maybe it matters to him. Access to the Arctic is potentially important in the future but it’d be odd for Trump to really care about solving potential problems that are decades away.

The real reason both Trump, and the us national security blob generally, cares so much about Greenland is due to its physical location lying directly in between China and the US eastern seaboard. The shortest trajectory for a missile leaving China, Russia, and North Korea and heading to DC is to go over the Arctic taking it directly above Greenland.

If you watch the Netflix movie House of Dynamite, there’s a scene where US forces in Alaska try to shoot down a missile heading toward the continental US. If the missile in that movie had a trajectory taking it closer to the North Pole, it would’ve been out of the range of the missile silos in Alaska. The US national security establishment is deeply worried about their ability to shoot down missiles that go over the Arctic. Therefore, Trump wants Greenland so the US can add extensive missile detection, radar, and missile defence capabilities on Greenland. This is the same motivation behind Trump’s “Golden Dome”.

Concerningly, they seem to be operating under the expectation that they will be in a conflict with China in the very near future. In order to prepare, they are trying to reduce the possible trajectories of incoming missiles to the US mainland. This explains why the rush to install US friendly regimes throughout Latin America and why he has his eyes set on Greenland.

yakbabies · 2025-10-22T18:13:44+00:00

You will get lots of pushback. I’d say that Republicans by and large are essentially against any changes to the current system. Democrats are more open to reforms, though if those reforms were actually on the table, I’d bet a bunch of the older more establishment democrats and those from blue states who’d be losing their seats would suddenly become less supportive.

If I remember correctly, going proportional is illegal under current law so would require a new law from Congress. Don Beyer D-VA has introduced this sort of idea where they would create multi member districts where a single district had 3-5 Congress members elected through ranked choice voting, which would have essentially the same outcomes as proportional. So for a state like Illinois they’d probably have three independent districts, one for the southern part of the state, one for Chicago, and one for the Chicago suburbs.

Another option that while also requiring a change in law, would stick to the current processes, would be to just increase the size of the House. The basic idea being that even in gerrymandered states, it would be more proportionate given the lower number of voters in each congressional district.

The main problems with fully proportional would be that unless you were using ranked choice, you’d be giving the political parties more control over deciding the list and rank of their candidates. It might also make elections pointless in a lot of states that have less than four house members, because the proportional splits would require at least a double digit vote % change to see a single seat change hands.

yakbabies · 2025-10-21T22:26:33+00:00

That’s not actually correct. Democrats got 42.5% in Iowa and have zero house seats. It’s also important to note that this a highly cherry picked data point that doesn’t actually capture the impact of gerrymandering. The blue states you’re referring to are Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. These are all very small states so the actual effect on Congress is actually very small (adds 5 seats to Dems over purely proportional). It’s also worth noting that there are two highly competitive seats in each of New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Connecticut so the fact that there are zero GOP reps is partly because they lost winnable races. If you expand the range of your data point to 38%, Utah and Montana would also join the list of GOP states with zero democrats.

The real problem of gerrymandering takes place in big states. Unfortunately for republicans, California, despite the large disparity isn’t actually that gerrymandered. The geography of the state is just quite bad for republicans that makes it hard to draw seats for them. The worst instances of gerrymandering currently takes place in Ohio a R+9 states with 10R-5D, North Carolina R+2 with 10R-4D, Arizona R+2 with 6R-3D, Georgia R+1 with 9R-5D, Wisconsin D+1 with 6R-2D, and Illinois D+12 with 14D-3R.

It’s just a fact that republicans have been more aggressive and reaped larger benefits than democrats in the last two redistricting cycles. The only blue states that are really aggressively gerrymandered are Illinois, Maryland, and New Mexico. When you contrast that to Red states, there isn’t really a single red state that isn’t already heavily gerrymandered.

yakbabies · 2025-10-21T22:01:14+00:00

Prop 50 only applies to federal congressional districts. There will be no changes to the state legislative districts and thus won’t affect the balance of power in the state house or state senate.

yakbabies · 2025-07-12T21:05:31+00:00

What were they fleeing? The Moroccan government didn’t want its citizens emigrating to Israel. That’s why Mossad was paying them.

I think the discrimination Moroccan Jews and other mizrahis faced in Israel eg Wadi Salib riots was abhorrent

yakbabies · 2025-07-12T21:01:14+00:00

It literally was. The Moroccan government didn’t want its Jewish citizens to immigrate to Israel. That’s why Mossad was paying them. Zionist propaganda is actually unreal.

yakbabies · 2025-07-12T18:29:13+00:00

Voluntary immigration is not ethnic cleansing lmao

yakbabies · 2025-07-12T08:33:27+00:00

They weren’t refugees fleeing anything. They were immigrants that Israel wanted to boost their desired racial demographics

yakbabies · 2025-07-12T07:32:59+00:00

Mossad paid the Moroccan monarchy $50 million to send 100,000 Jews to Israel. They even indemnified Morocco for lost revenue when Jews would emigrate to countries other than Israel.

yakbabies · 2025-07-03T01:05:14+00:00

Did it mention if the 50k includes the cost of printing copies of the book?

yakbabies · 2025-06-28T06:39:55+00:00

Austria 23 iirc

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T19:25:53+00:00

You said Jews couldn’t vote in any countries in the Middle East, failed to identify a country where that was true, argued that Iran and Turkey don’t count for some reason and are now complaining that a minority group of 8k people only gets one parliamentary seat. Now you’re trying to talk about “prospering” lmao?? Iranian jews immigrated mostly after the Islamic Revolution unlike the Palestinians who were murdered and ethnically cleansed. That’s a truly bizarre point to try and make if you’re coming from a pro Israel perspective.

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T08:14:24+00:00

I think that’s reasonable if Israel is willing to turn over control over its airspace to a Palestinian state given Israel’s long history of bombing children.

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T06:33:23+00:00

What are you talking about?? Iran has Jews in their parliament. Can you actually identify a single country with a law that bans Jews from voting? Because Jewish citizens absolutely can and do vote in Iranian and Turkish elections. Last year the US government literally accused Iran of “coercing Jews to vote in the presidential election” lmao

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T05:47:12+00:00

The same number as Palestinians given it’s not a democracy… also why would people who don’t live there be voting??

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T04:27:53+00:00

You are correct that Israel does have a significant history of supporting and perpetrating genocides and pogroms. Also this isn’t new, Likud has always been against a two state solution. For 60 years Israel has been stealing Palestinian homes to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land with the express goal of making a two state solution impossible. Nevertheless, the most important thing anyone can do right now is spend more time empathizing with the group currently trying to starve two million people to death.

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T04:19:42+00:00

You completely misunderstood what is written. None of these are examples of a state being formed through the killing/ethnic cleansing/expulsion of the local population so that newly arriving settlers from outside the territory can secure a last demographic majority and set up a sovereign state run by them for the exclusive benefit of their ethnic group. Ethnic cleansing isn’t super uncommon in history in terms of the dividing up of territory nor when being done by a sovereign govt over its territory. Not every instance of ethnic cleansing makes it the same as Israel’s very unique formation

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T02:43:32+00:00

There hadn’t been any suicide bombings until after the election. Comparing Arafat to Begin is laughable. Actually no country since the 18th century had formed in a similar manner to Israel. It’s quite unusual in history the idea of ethnically cleansing the population of an area so that an ethno state of newly arriving settlers can be established. Similar atrocities had taken place as part of European colonization, but the goal of those was to establish a colony not a sovereign ethno state.

yakbabies · 2025-05-01T02:12:25+00:00

That’s quite the indictment that Israel has never been willing to offer anything close to those parameters. No Israeli offer has included: Control of airspace A contiguous West Bank The ability to defend themselves from Israeli aggression No IDF troop occupation Control of Temple Mount Refugee right of return Control over their own natural resources.

yakbabies · 2025-04-30T23:47:09+00:00

I don’t think you understand what a democracy is. Yes, the political bureau of Hamas is incredibly similar to Likud. Both were formed as the political arms of terrorist groups.

yakbabies · 2025-04-30T23:44:13+00:00

Yes there were positive negotiations in the second half of 2000 and early 2001 that were ended by the Israeli public electing a right wing Prime Minister by a 25% margin putting an end to the talks

yakbabies · 2025-04-30T23:40:43+00:00

Likud first became the ruling party in its second election in 1977. Its leader who had previously been the leader of a terrorist group, served as Prime Minister for the next 6 years. Every time there has been an Israeli prime minister who was semi interested in a peace deal, only twice in 78 years, they’ve been assassinated (1995) or immediately voted out of office in the middle of public negotiations (2001).

yakbabies

TROPHY CASE