That too!

Yes to all 4. A majority are transplants too.

> Protesting doesn’t do anything these days.

Protesting in the American sense - effectively-sanctioned inner-city riots far from the seats of power, performative kumbaya-singing, etc - sure doesn't. We could take a cue from the French: they've been shutting down their country with enormous strikes, including the electrical workers' unions shutting off power selectively to the mansions of rich people and politicians. Unfathomably based.

> My biggest gripe is that the committee is charging full steam ahead without a care for commissioner of finance and management’s statement on this bill’s effects:

They just don't care. They want poor and working-class people out, as fast as possible.

> Do we all understand that you can't have a well-rounded community without workers?

We do. The people calling the shots in the state do too. They just don't care.

> staffing shortages.

Staffing shortages at the wages offered is how everyone should mentally translate that phrase every time you see it. Everything makes tons more sense that way.

For sure. Inserting race into every story, especially where it's irrelevant, and always in the most contentious and off-putting way possible, has got to be a top-down directive. It's too ubiquitous and serves the donor class's interests too well. My favorite recent NPR story was something like "in historic first, Boston elects Asian mayor, here's how that's bad for black people." Out of touch indeed.

God willing.

> Also how many "wfh yuppies" actually moved here.

Just on my street in southern VT? 8 households. At least 5 of those (the only ones I know for sure) paid cash for their houses. 4 bought sight-unseen. They haven't left, unfortunately. Meanwhile my working-class friends can't even come close to affording to buy a house, and are living in dumpy rentals, in one case without working heat.

> They actually live here too

Until we force them out, inshallah.

> Yeah, it was a really strange editorial choice.

I think it's entirely expected of VPR and NPR. :(

Thanks for your post, it's really good, and lays out a lot of the reasons I stopped donating to, and then stopped listening to, VPR and NPR. I'm sure /u/bravestatevt will read your post, but I don't expect anything will change, because the issues with their coverage are structural.

The whole post was good, but this part stood out:

>Let me reframe this, with the opening stories of the episode in mind. Our economic situation is such that middle class folks have turned to mining our communities to stay afloat. This isn't a story about how Airbnb is providing an important lifeline for people; it's one of decades of policy failure that has resulted in people desperate to hold on carving up their own communities, and the conflict that causes, which they reported on so nicely at the beginning.

This is something I saw over and over before I gave up on VPR/NPR. Big issues with real impact on regular people would usually get reported on (sometimes stories just wouldn't be covered, but that's another issue), but when the root causes were right there and obvious, the reporting would nonetheless be some dissembling mush about "nuance", or "complexity", usually with a heavy-handed implication that there was nothing to be done.

Why does this happen, when following threads back is straightforward and would make for engaging stories? I would bet anything that certain lines of inquiry are just banned at VPR, either implicitly or explicitly, depending on who or what would be implicated. If the thread leads back to our overall economic system, or failures of some (allied) political party over decades, or especially if they lead back to businesses owned by the oligarchs who fund VPR/NPR, then no one is going to pull on those threads. This happens a lot, because basically every major problem we face leads back to material economic conditions imposed on us by the oligarch class.

TLDR: NPR and its affiliates are beholden to the oligarch class who largely fund them. This affects their coverage in significant ways, leading to specific problems like you pointed out, among others. As long as NPR is funded by billionaire "foundations", it is going to work in the interest of those billionaires.

Thanks for pointing this out. New housing will just be bought by hedge funds, AirBnb speculators, 3rd-home types, and out-of-state WFH yuppies, just like now. We need rules that incentivize housing going to people who need it and actually live here.

> Entire neighborhoods that look like this like the Seaport District in Boston are a monstrosity and hostile to human use. Having some variety in architectural style in the Downtown on the other hand is not a bad thing at all.

I agree about the Boston seaport. But every new modernist building makes the area around it worse. Every one of them should be opposed.

> The library and the bank building are hardly modern by the standards of anywhere outside of Vermont

They're not new, but their aesthetic style - bleak, flat, harsh - is absolutely modern. They all fall in the same aesthetic category as the proposed BMAC turd.

Daily reminder that even the worst-case right-wing estimates are that Medicare for All would save $300 billion a year - in addition to preventing shitshows like this. The reason we have horrific billing processes like this instead of universal healthcare is not because the latter would cost more.

Grants from billionaire ghouls' "foundations" presumably.

> Dude right now it's an ugly 1950s one story building that's the most out of place building in downtown and has a negative impact on the overall feeling of enclosure and sense of place.

Yes, the existing building is very bad. That doesn't mean it should be replaced with something differently hideous. Why set the bar so low?

> One modern building in the entire town is not a bad thing.

There are already quite a few monstrosities: the library, the people's bank building, the coop. I fear this building will add one more bleak, unadorned 5-over-1 turd made out of petroleum glues to the list.

I have no idea if you're being sarcastic or not, but that building is repulsive at a visceral level. Architecture like that is designed to make people feel alienated, uncomfortable, and adrift. Inshallah, it will not be built.

The report Shumlin waved around at the press conference showed that for the overwhelming majority of Vermonters, they would have come out ahead with single-payer, even in the worst-case projections. He lied about that, and compliant media just transcribed and repeated his quotes, instead of writing from the document he held in his hand.

I was using "for profit" as shorthand for the status quo private system. As for the report, I'm on my phone now, but it's ready enough to Google: I'm taking about the report Shumlin waved in his hand when he announced he was killing universal healthcare.

Fair enough, and very easy to fix: make health care free at the point of use for year-round VT residents.

I'm sure you're right. We should kill two birds with one stone and guarantee universal health care for all. We'd save money, help real people in a material way, and allow regular people to serve in the legislature.

Insuring just legislators would probably be "expensive". Enacting Medicare for All nationally would save $300 billion a year. When Shumlin killed single-payer here, the report he commissioned showed that even in the worst case projections, the overwhelming majority of Vermonters would have come out ahead, something like paying $4 in taxes to save $5 in premiums. The case is even better now that for-profit health care costs have grown exponentially in the 10 years since then.

So the answer is - easily! Keeping the status quo is the fiscally irresponsible choice.

Everyone should have health care that's free to use.

> Imagine you’re running for congress a criminal handed you $26k of ill-gotten money

I would disavow the fucking money. There is no money from top-end crypto ghouls that isn't dirty. If Balint didn't know this, she is an idiot. (But I know she's not.)

> At this point, there is no evidence the Congresswoman knew about the fraud. It appears she was used as a pawn in the FTX fraud agenda.

For fuck's sake. Everyone called me a nutjob or a rightoid when I said during the campaign that taking money from any crypto ghoul was a terrible thing to do, but I was right and this is why. There is basically zero money at the top of the crypto world that isn't sleazy ill-gotten gains. It should be seen like taking money from a cartel boss - even if you don't know what the money will be spent on, or have direct knowledge of any specific crimes, it's a good idea to publicly disavow support from people who have people's heads cut off with chainsaws.

(And no, I didn't want Molly Gray either.)