Vacancy rates in the places where people actually want to live are really low. Besides, are people not allowed to have vacation homes?

Market price is a function of supply and demand. We’ve been under building housing for years.

The most important part of what you said is that you’d build “SO much” housing. If we’d just let the free market build all the housing it wants without letting NIMBYs get in the way, we’d have largely solved the housing crisis.

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills.

Honestly, why learn programming then?

I’m asking this as a programmer myself. I’m not trying to discourage you from learning it by any means, if that’s what you want to do. I’m just asking because it doesn’t sound as if you actually want to do it.

You’ve already tried learning it, and it’s a slog (whereas for me, I was immediately fascinated by it when I was introduced to it as a teenager, even though I was horrible at it). You don’t have any burning desires to create apps (whereas for me, there are so many ideas I want to explore, so many things I want to create that don’t exist yet, but alas I don’t have enough time or energy to work on it all). You don’t even have the desire to do it for purely career-related purposes, which is what I’d imagine drives most of the rest of people learning programming without enjoying it at all.

So why bother with learning something you neither enjoy nor have strong motivations to do?

Support for the war is high in Ukraine. Where did you get your sources for freedom of speech being suspended in Ukraine and people with anti war sentiments getting arrested?

It’s ironic, you claim to care about the people, but you don’t care about what the people of Ukraine actually want.

all I want to see is the meatgrinder stop.

Even at the cost of Ukrainian territorial integrity? That’s for the Ukrainians to decide, and so far they’re picking the meat grinder. More power to them.