I'm really sorry you're in this predicament, and I feel your pain. I moved here 5 years ago, and right after closing, our house's heating system failed and we didn't really have the cash to replace it or install a stove. It was a very long, hard winter.

My only thought is go meet your neighbors and ask them for advice. We didn't know any of our neighbors then. Now that we do, they've all said how happy they would've been to help us out any way they could've, as I would for any new neighbor. If nothing else, you can have a friendly place to warm up on the coldest days.

Wood heating in Vermont is also really common. We do 90% of our heating with wood at my place and that's pretty typical for my area.

Any chance you've got a chimney that can take a wood stove? If not, my sister just had an outdoor chimney installed and it cost her about 3k all said and done, which is not even that much more than filling your tank!

There's a really good book by Milton Mayer called "They Thought They Were Free." He was a Jewish journalist that moved to Germany shortly after WW2, where he befriended former Nazi party members and wrote about them. It's been a long time since I read it, but it really affected me, and what I got out of it was that regular people supported the nazis and the holocaust without really actually meaning to. They didn't even seem to have particular animosity towards Jews.

One of the people Mayer details in the book is a banker who joined the party late in its rise and was honesty pretty clearly never really super into it. This is what he told his long-time Jewish friend about his joining the party:

>With men like me in the party, things will be better. You'll see.

Days after that conversation, kristallnacht happened.

It's a bit of a theme in that person's story; the idea that good people in the party thought their membership in it was harmless, or could even help moderate it. Obviously, they didn't. In fact, that same person talks about how deeply he regretted his decision to join. He says the moderates who joined the party ended up making the extremism of the party possible.

Scott sits down, breaks bread, and actively collaborates with Abbott, DeSantis, Noem, and other actual fascists. That's a serious lack of judgement for even a regular person, but it's unacceptable to me in a person in a position of power. When I think about the lessons of history, I just can't forgive that.

I once sued an employer. You need a lawyer. Don't listen to random people on Reddit or read random blog posts. The inevitable specifics of your situation make any advice other than "get a lawyer" meaningless.

Start taking lots of contemporaneous notes because the process will take long enough that you'll start to forget details. The Vermont bar association will refer you to a lawyer that has agreed to do free or very cheap initial consultations.

Yeah but you have to actually do a study to determine that relationship, which is exactly backwards from what this "study" did.

Flu rates are a much simpler metric than "most stressed," which is a very squishy phrase that they don't even bother to define. Afaik no one tracks stress levels nationally, and if they do, there's a million different ways that'll give you a million different answers. "How stressed are people" is a very different question from "how many people have the flu." Even if they wanted to do this right, it would be a lot harder because the CDC can't just give you a number for you to correlate with search data.

Methodology is absolute crap and does not support that conclusion.

>The study, conducted by addiction specialists at Diamond Rehab Thailand, analyzed Google Trends data for a selection of stress-relief terms to see which states were more stressed-out compared to others.

They're comparing what terms the different states are googling. Going from what people are googling to how stressed they are is crazy and unsupported leap to make.

Also the "addiction specialists" are a for-profit rehab center doing a blog post (aka a "study") for marketing.

Omg!!! No one ever knows about him and i don't know why! He's so fucking good!! His illustrations too.

Did you read Mr Pye too? So different from gormenghast and yet so clearly from the same strange and wonderful mind.

Also I just noticed: is your username a gormenghast reference??? I love Mervyn Peake!!!

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but in your analysis of voting for the individual, I ask that you take into account the full picture.

Being part of a party is a lot more than the letter besides your name. Like I said in my comment, Scott participates in Republican fundraising. He is part of fundraising organizations with some of the worst politicians in the US. This organization has an annual operating budget of almost $100 million, which they deployed to help flip Virginia on a bullshit CRT panic just last year:

>In 2021, we sent shockwaves across the country when we helped flip Virginia blue to red.

He's also happy to take their money:

> ... the Republican Governors Association, which has spent millions of dollars on super PAC ads backing Scott's candidacy.

Scott might use his words to criticize the national rise of the MAGA movement, but he collaborates with it and supports it with his actions. If you take that into account and still decide Scott is your man, by all means, but don't let him and others pretend like being a Republican is just a letter next to your name. That's a trick they're playing to keep your attention away from the huge fundraising machinery the party operates in the shadows.

edit: typo

I happen to know cyprus just expanded its parental leave last month and has less than a million people.

https://cyprus-mail.com/2022/10/04/eight-weeks-paid-parental-leave-to-be-paid-for-all-parents/#:~:text=Parents%20with%20children%20up%20to,Kyriacos%20Koushos%20said%20on%20Tuesday.

That's off the top of my head because i happen to have a friend there. It's every single country. I guarantee you i can find you more if you're still not satisfied.

It's not data. It's fear. You made up data that isn't real to rationalize your fear.

This is the fear I'm talking about. Every single country has paid family leave but us, including way poorer and less developed ones. They all love it. It's just us.

Yeah i don't like it either. He's just a really good politician.

Also this is my own analysis so grain of salt. I'm just someone on the internet lol

I also found this baffling, but after talking to my less plugged in neighbors, I think there are two big factors at play.

First, Vermonters, and Americans in general, culturally value judging an individual based on their own merits. Scott has come out against Trump and doesn't act like the nutso Republicans. I think regular people really respect that even though it's misguided, since his affiliation with all those lunatics is entirely voluntary. People say things like "you can't judge him based on his party," when judging people by the company they choose to keep is actually such commonplace advice it's even a common idiom across several languages ("a man is judged by the company he keeps " in English; "Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres" in Spanish).

In fact, it's not just voluntary; it's strategic and mutually beneficial. He shares campaigning resources with other Vermont GOP politicians as well as national Republican governors. He attends fundraising events with the Desantis and Abbot. Organizations like the Republican Governor's Association put money into his campaigns because they know Scott can raise funds from donors that would never go near someone like Noem. His very presence at these kinds of fundraisers launders the image of the entire party.

Second, I think he plays into a common American fear. Vermonters know what policies would make our lives better, and we elect legislators who support those things. But every time in all of American history someone has pushed for social progress, businesses tell us that it might force them to lay off workers. They say it'll cost jobs. It's a threat. We've internalized this threat so much that I think we're afraid of progress. We're afraid of it even though we don't need to be. Literally the entire rest of the world has paid family leave, and they're all super happy with it. Every other developed nation has single payer healthcare and much affordable or free higher education. We know what we need to do, but we're too afraid to do it, so we elect Scott. He vetoes paid family leave, higher minimum wage, etc., with his Uncle Phil demeanor and tut-tuts about fiscal responsibility. It plays directly our fear and we absolutely eat up the "bipartisanship" of it all, especially since people see him as someone who has proven himself by rejecting Trump and such.

I could not disagree more. Tax enforcement is famously complicated, while by its very nature short-term rental has to be well advertised and publicly available to be viable as a business. AirBnB et al provide you with a list or properties along with a description. It'd be so much easier to enforce a ban on SFH housing on airbnb and other sites than for each town to audit the property taxes of every house to figure out if that person actually lives there and if so which tier of property taxes they belong to and such. We know rich people will just pay for accountants to try to skirt the rules, which will lead to very complex tax audits of rental empires. It's well documented that the IRS is underfunded and can't enforce the existing tax rules at the federal level.

>The firm in particular has sold more homes to flat landers than natives - and they have the data to prove it from their brokerage.

I don't actually think that disagrees with what I'm saying, but those people aren't moving here. They're either out-of-state landlords or buying vacation homes.

Here's a breakdown of the data. From https://vtdigger.org/2022/08/12/wildly-unusual-census-shows-explosion-of-migration-into-vermont-in-pandemics-first-year/

>More than 4,800 people moved to Vermont between 2020 and 2021, the highest net migration total the state has reported in at least a decade, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates.

4800 people is around .7% of the population.

Rest of data is from https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state/2022-02-03/how-can-vermont-solve-its-housing-crisis

>* In 1999, 4.8% of medium-priced homes were sold to corporate buyers,” Joe says. By 2018, that number jumped to 20%.

> * As of a couple years ago, nearly 20% of Vermont’s housing stock was being used seasonally, not year-round, which is a higher percentage than most other states. And that number has likely grown since the pandemic took hold.

That 20% from 2018 is now out of date. This says it's up to 26% now.

American governmnet-owned housing does totally suck because it comes from a racist history of wanting to segregate poor, usually black city residents. It's a total self-own, because there are good examples of social housing being very desirable in cities. More than 40% of French renters live in publicly owned housing, and French cities and towns are top tier in the world in basically every way.

> AirBnBs aren't the problem, it's most AirBnBs that are the problem. People who convert part of their home, or make a yurt on their land to rent, those people are not the problem, and your "just ban it!" Attitude isn't specific enough. That's why tax incentives work better when done well.

Your "when done well" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. My point is that your solution is just my solution + more steps + an exception for rich people.

If you want to tax things to disincentivize them, you have to make carve outs for the things you mention or you end up disincentivizing those too. If you have to go through the exercise of figuring out what's harmful and what's desirable anyway, then our solutions look the same except yours lets rich people pay their way out of it.

Why not just ban airbnbs in single family homes and allow yurts, spare bedrooms, etc.?

edit: fix autocarrot

Why not just ban the thing you want to ban? What's the advantage of trying to get rid of a bad thing by increasing taxes vs just getting rid of the bad thing? AirBnB is bad. We all hate it. Let's just get rid of it so that people can live in those houses and be done with it.

It seems like as a society we've decided to replace a government that does things with a rube goldberg machine of tax incentives.

Build public housing and ban airbnb.

Data conclusively shows that out of state migration is not the problem. Vermont saw a "huge" spike in migrants during the pandemic, which still only translated to something like .8% of the population. Meanwhile, 50% of all new construction and 20% of existing housing is second homes. Corporate buyers are making up 20% of all SFH sales in the state, up from just 5% a couple decades ago. My tiny town has a couple born-and-raised local landlords who have been aggressively expanding their portfolio in the last few years.

The anger at out-of-staters does nothing but obscure the real division, which is one of class.

Let's ban airbnb and invest in public housing.

Don't forget just-cause evictions in Burlington and the rental registry, both of which were supposed to address this problem.

The entire country descends further into crisis by the day, and we continue to elect a governor who, by his own admission in the last debate, doesn't have any new ideas; he wants to continue what he's been doing because he says it's working. Everyone agrees the status quo is fucked, but most people are going to vote for the personification of the status quo for governor. I don't understand.

Build public housing!

My own opinion: I think degrowth scholarship is really important. We need to question these fundamental assumptions about our world. For example, we take it for granted that GDP is the most important measure of an economy, but is it really?

Just talking about potentially big paradigm shifts is so important because otherwise our imaginations become stunted by the times we live in. You can see in this very thread how even people who recognize that we're destroying the only habitable planet just can't imagine a world that different from how it is right now. People using words like "realistic" and "feasible" without really examining the assumptions that go into that. We spent $300 million per day for 20 years in Afghanistan alone, but moving off fossil fuels somehow isn't realistic.

It reminds me of all those philosophers during the enlightenment who pushed for liberalism, rule of law, and a constitution, but at the same time mocked those who thought they could actually get rid of the monarchy or abolish slavery for being unrealistic.

No, I think you're thinking of the more reactionary Malthusian population control stuff that's like eugenics's cursed cousin. Degrowth is a collection of frameworks and ideas that critique the economy's (destructive and unsustainable) need for infinite growth in order to function. It's less genocidal and more influenced by anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, feminism, anarchism, etc.