masterspace
@masterspace@lemmy.ca
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 6 days ago:
Yeah. Try and follow the conversation.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 1 week ago:
Multiple competitors just results in them all agreeing to raise prices when taxes are lowered.
Price signalling happens in situations with low competition, in a healthy, competitive market, if you raises prices someone will undercut you to take your business.
Out of curiosity, how do you propose increasing the number of competitors? Or is this a situation of “gee, that would be nice. Oh well, I guess nothing can be done.”?
You literally just break up grocery store companies and stop them from merging in the future. The solution is not complicated.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 1 week ago:
No I didn’t.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 1 week ago:
It does. Competition is literally the only mechanism that drives greedy actors to lower prices or improve their service. Without competition they hoarde.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 1 week ago:
That’s not really relevant. A break in sales tax that just targets consumer necessities should be a progressive tax.
The problem is that a lack of competition in this country means that grocers can raise their prices with no fear of losing customers
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
I’ve been in contract with them for 15 years and have a pretty exact idea of how much work they put in and how much they spend, read: far less than their own house and 1 hr a month on average is about right.
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
By your logic, what happens when the roof needs to be replaced and it costs $15,000 to do that? The rent goes up by $15,000 that year? That’s ridiculous.
This is why rent is higher than a particular year’s costs – it includes capital costs over a period of time. $15,000 over 15 years is $1,000/year or about $84/mo.
I was including ongoing building maintenance costs spread over time as part of operating costs.
Add that to the cost of landscaping, utilities, turnover costs, plus a wage for the owner. Why is the wage $25/hour? Why not $100/hour? It’s a skilled job.
Lmao, no it’s not. It does not require a degree or any kind of specialized training. And tell me what landlord actually spend 10 hours per month working on an individual property, every month. If you want to nitpick the example we should lower that to probably 1.
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
This describes any financial transaction in a capitalist system.
No it does not. If I pay you to build a water desalinating machine then suddenly we’ll have an abundance of fresh water. We’ve increased the available supply of water overall.
Similarly building more housing is not as morally bankrupt as buying up existing housing and renting it back out at a profit. If you actually build more housing, you are providing a service, if you only get paid for the hours you work and you only make a reasonable amount of money, you might actually be net benefit to society as a whole.
On the other hand when you live in a city where there is a limited supply of housing and you buy that up and rent it back to people at a profit so that you don’t have to work, you are simply draining the system of resources.
There is a reason that economists literally use the term ‘rent-seeking’ to describe behaviour that is personally profitable while draining the efficiency of the system as a whole, and not all types of businesses are considered to be rent-seeking.
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
Lots of perfectly nice, pleasant, and moral people do jobs that make the world a worst place because of the circumstances they find themselves in.
Unless your aunt is only charging them what it costs her to operate the buildings + a reasonable hourly wage for the actual time she spends on the house every year, then yeah it’s immoral.
If she puts in 10 hours a month and charges rent that is equal to her costs (not the property / mortgage costs, but just the operating, and maintenance costs) + 120hrs of her time per year x ~$25/hr (or whatever wage is livable in your area) then it’s fair, but realistically that would mean she would be charging ~$800 / month for that town home, and I’m guessing she’s charging a lot more. In effect, that means that she is making renters pay for her mortgage while she’s not working, and at the end of the day will end up a multimillionaire off of her tenants’ hard work.
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.
Oh wow, she has to do 40 hours of work a year, she totally deserves a full time salary for that!
- Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords? 1 week ago:
When landlords “invest” in the housing market, they are not making the system of providing housing for people better or more efficient. They are buying up a limited supply of properties that exist in desirable areas and then charging people for the right to use them plus a nice profit for themselves. This reduces the supply for a necessary good and drives up prices, making it profitable for landlords, and a massive, efficiency draining, example of rent-seeking for the system as a whole.
If you invest in some predatory companies you might be investing in companies that do that, or might do some other predatory practice, but you can also just be putting money into a business so that it has more money to grow its operations, or invest in some new efficiency that makes them run better, and that then both returns a profit back to both of you and helps improve the system as a whole.
Think about it this way, when you retire, you are going to need money to sustain you for a long time after you stop being able to work, so while you’re working, you need to save that money up, that money can just sit in your bank account doing nothing for anyone, or you can invest it in a business that lets them use those resources now and lets you get your retirement money back 30 years from now when you need it (though in reality that’s spread across hundreds of companies to reduce risk). That’s how investment can be a net benefit to society and make for a better use of resources, characteristics not present with landlords and housing investments.
- Comment on *Everyone liked that* 2 weeks ago:
I mean, there are huge problems with American health care companies and insurance in general will always tend towards being a scam unless it’s extremely heavily regulated, but at a fundamental level insurance does offer a service (that of socializing the cost of extreme losses), and while executives do have fiduciary duties, the idea that they always have to pursue short term profit no matter what from a legal standpoint, is overblown and exaggerated.
- Comment on *Everyone liked that* 2 weeks ago:
We left Reddit because it was a corporate captured shit show that killed the only nice apps for interacting with it. We didn’t leave because they were too mean to health insurance executives.
- Comment on *Everyone liked that* 2 weeks ago:
Understandably. I’m emotionally removed from the situation enough to know that I shouldn’t actively celebrate, if I knew a loved one who’s medical care was denied by a for profit health insurer or if I had to waste my life fighting with them for basic care, then I’m sure I would be actively celebrating too.
- Comment on *Everyone liked that* 2 weeks ago:
Quite frankly, executives of health care companies continually make money by denying medical coverage to people with children and letting them agonizingly die.
I’m not on here celebrating his death for the sole reason that I think it’s just as likely this corporate espionage / assassination for money, but if it is a normal person shooting a health insurance executive for denying a loved ones coverage it’s hard to imagine how the executive didn’t deserve it.
You don’t get to be separated from the morality of your actions, just because you use neutral sounding business language to describe how you’re fucking over and killing people for personal profit.
- Comment on What happens when a prominent person is assassinated and the perpetrator cannot be identified? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on 'Dark Patterns' became normalized: When asked to build web pages, LLMs use manipulative design practices they learned from web pages generated by humans, study says 3 weeks ago:
So do my coworkers
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
I think you misunderstand the point of hate speech laws, it’s not to not hear it, its because people rightly recognize that spreading ideas in itself can be dangerous given how flawed human beings are.
The idea that all ideas are harmless and spreading them to others has no effect is divorced from reality.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
Except that they’ve been largely unsuccessful at the legal level. Courts in every western country recognizes the valid right to protest Israel and the actions of the Israeli government and expressly does not consider that anti-Semitic or hate speech.
There have been a few minor edge cases in some countries around controversial slogans like ‘From the River to the Sea’, and directly expressing support for organizations like Hamas, but by and large hate speech laws have not been abused. They’re mostly used to shut down and arrest neo Nazis and xenophobic rioters.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
Ah, you’re so terminally online that you brand anyone who mildly disagrees with you a ‘bot’.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
At the societal level with hate speech laws you can’t use bots though. You’re going to have to waste the courts time by wasting real people’s time dragging them in front of judges for protest actions. Eventually the courts will just make it a fine that police can quickly issue.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
The UK is the weird outlier but there is still a defense of truth in the UK. The difference is that the person accusing you of defamation doesn’t have to prove that you’re wrong and you do have to prove that you’re right.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
These are mostly incidents of people publicly expressing support for Hamas, and being arrested for expressing support for a designated terrorist organization, and pretty much all confined to the UK, which has some of the weakest individual protections in the EU / western world.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
Those would not be considered hate speech laws I other countries, just normal no-threatening laws. Hate Speech laws typically protect against inciting hatred or violence against an identifiable group, actually uttering threats is a different broader law.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
In which countries is that the case?
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
It’s Twitter, there are no communities, what are you talking about?
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
You’re talking about the one instance of Germany ruling that a single controversial slogan was hate speech?
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
Free speech as in, the freedom to express valid political speech and criticize the current government? Sure. Easy.
Free speech as in, the ability to say whatever the hell you want, including threatening, harassing, or inciting hatred and genocide against people? No. No you cannot.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
No they don’t. The argument is that good actors get overly punished for doing things that shouldn’t be illegal yet are. You’re not even being logically consistent.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
Completely and utterly false.
Every single western country outside of America has hate speech laws without issue.
A) they are not that open ended and subjective
B) the idea that laws can’t be open ended, subjective, or governed through intent and spirit of the law, is only the case in the dumbass American legal system that has been intentionally ruined by simple minded Republicans