I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.

My father falls hard for pig butchering and romance and job scams. On top of the social engineering where he sent various people all his life savings, they also sold his account information and repeatedly drained his accounts. He noticed and reported as fraud the non-voluntary transactions (remaining impervious to all their red-flag communications on the voluntary transactions), on at least a weekly basis for like a year before the banks iced him out. I can’t really blame the banks there.

Credit unions can be predatory, too. The US’s largest credit union, Navy Federal, has one of the highest rates of fees charged per customer, even compared to banks. https://www.nclc.org/resources/top-overdraft-fee-offenders-hitting-civilian-military-families/

Are there any progressives you are hoping will run? I’m not familiar with most politicians, would be helpful to know who’s worth learning more about.

Ah, I missed part where home flippers left the market. I’m not totally following the chain of logic after that, but I am OK with that.

I am not convinced using regulation (tax incentive or otherwise) to drive larger landlords out of the market would improve the experience of the average renter. Some small landlords are terrible. With proper regulation, some ginormous ones are good (countries that do public housing well - government-run is bigger than any corporate landlord).

…the mortgage is lower risk for the bank… allowing them to extend those loans to more people

That was the part I meant about this proposal increasing demand by giving the average person more purchasing power.

Multiple strategies makes sense. Quadratic property tax is a new one to me, and it confused Google. Is it like a progressive tax, where larger valuations are taxed at a higher rate?

When the underlying problem is insufficient supply in the locations people want to live, anything that gives average person more purchasing power (such as making banks comfortable with larger loans) just drives up the price even higher.

Densifying metro areas (the places people are moving to) is the only real solution. Otherwise the price has to be unaffordable for the average person, to drive them into finding a way to live in a more rural area or to put up with a multiple-roommate living arrangement.

I think I have learned about seven separate ticketing systems at my work, so far. The specialized ones are associated with small teams I know and can go harass if they don’t answer in a reasonable time frame. The big main one, the associates reliably answer quickly, to let me know they can’t help me. It all feels very broken.