At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.

Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.

Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.

Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).

I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, ‘You can claim those waters if you want, but you can’t possibly keep us from entering them, so we’re just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we’re gonna call in big brother America.’

I didn’t realize he wasn’t trying to sell his game, so I guess we need a different analogy.

Ok, imagine you and your brother are making a website where friends can post about their lives and keep up with each other during and after college. You’re pretty open with your project and then one day the one weird guy in your friend group launches your project without consulting you. The project takes off and makes billions of dollars. You sue the weirdo and he gives you some money, but you’re still pissed about it. Did you get Zucked?

Ok, so imagine that you’re hungry and you come across a sandwich shop that has your favorite sandwich for $15, but the shop next door has the exact same sandwich for free. Which sandwich are you gonna eat?

No, wait, that’s not important. Most people are gonna eat the free sandwich, so even if you eat the $15 sandwich, you’re statistically irrelevant.

Yeah, maybe some people that weren’t hungry are gonna get a free sandwich, but the people who were hungry are also getting free sandwiches, which means that the guy trying to make a living selling $15 sandwiches is gonna have to close shop unless he starts lacing his sandwiches with cocaine.

Miranda knows that she can continue to pocket a majority of the restaurant profits if she can get the staff to blame each other for their discontentments.

You never know. Someone could make a time travel movie with it one day and then collectors will pay an arm and a leg for the left door.

That’s a good point, but I’m definitely paying more taxes now than I was before. My new state has income tax and tangible property (vehicle) tax that Florida didn’t have. I looked up tax distribution for my county and the majority goes into education, so I can’t complain too much.

I recently gave up my 3% mortgage from 2013 in exchange for a 7% mortgage. It hurts, but it was worth it to get out of Florida.

In the end, my housing costs actually didn’t change that much because my home insurance rates were skyrocketing.

There are 8 billion people on this planet now. Surely you can find someone other than your cousin.

It really shouldn’t need to be illegal, but I guess residents of the volunteer state require a little more incentive to find dates before the holidays, rather than during them.

I mean, isn’t all Indian food overspiced? You could probably make curry out of just about any meat or meat substitute and it will still taste like spices.

American food has a higher focus on meat flavor, which is why so many meat alternatives try to imitate meat. You can buy vegan Indian or Chinese food here that tastes decent, but it’s not a steak.