Gorilladrums

@Gorilladrums@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  These concepts are all interlinked. The idea of social mobility is that people change their socioeconomic status over time. This includes their work and housing. It’s baffling how you’re actually dense enough to quote an example from the study that I linked that echoes exactly the point that I’ve been barking at all this time, as some sort of win for you. My god, you’re slow.

  This example is there to clearly demonstrate how rent control worsens the housing crises by creating conditions that fuck over people in need. In this very example, the elderly lady’s socioeconomic status has changed. She’s no longer raising a family and she’s most likely retired. She’s all alone in a big unit that she doesn’t need, she’s literally only there because she wants to cling on to the controlled rent. But by doing so, she’s clogging up the unit from households that are still large and need that extra space. This is bad for her because downgrading to a smaller unit would better suit her needs but she feels the need to stay in the larger unit even though it’s unnecessary, and it’s also bad because there’s a large household out there that either doesn’t have a house at all or lives in a house that doesn’t suit their needs.

  This has nothing to do with evictions, and everything to do with how rent control creates conditions that stifle housing opportunities for everybody. Mobility is an integral part of any functional economy because people and society aren’t static, they’re dynamic. Situations and circumstances constantly change, and there needs to be a system that’s able to provide people with options that allows them to adapt to their current needs.

  If your level of education is quoting something that you clearly didn’t understand with such confidence then you’re a lost cause. As evidenced by you ignoring everything else that I stated in my previous comment, again, it’s clear at this point that you’re ignorant, an idiot, or a bad faith actor… if not all of the above. Since you have no interest in being honest or accurate, there’s no point in me continuing wasting time on you any further. You will forever continue to lie, deny, and cry. Therefore, this will be my last reply to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Good thing nobody is talking about Reganomics

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a brief period of time on the internet between the late 2000s and early 2010s where gaming journalism was genuinely decent because it was driven by passionate people who were trying to appeal to the gaming communities they were apart of. They were there to provide the community with good info and honest opinions first, and any money made was just a bonus. At some point, these priorities flipped, and internet journalism became job and then it became an industry that’s soulless, faceless, and driven by endless greed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  just refused to address those points!

  You’re just projecting because you’re full of shit. I did respond to your points, all of them, and in great detail too. But you chose to ignore them entirely because you’re simply incapable of responding to ANY of the points that I made. You still haven’t responded to how I dismantled your blatant misinformation of about the Soviet housing model or why public housing on a societal scale hasn’t worked. You ignore my responses, and then you have gall to pretend that I didn’t respond to your original claims? Get outta here with that bullshit.

  If you had even a shred of honesty, which I’m 100% sure you don’t, you would go back to my previous comments, and reply to the points that I made properly. Instead of throwing out some brain dead insult like “bootlicker” or giving some lazy excuse like “do your own research”, how about stop trying to deflect and distract and actually prove me wrong? It should be easy, right? Then go ahead and do it. But you won’t, and I’m fully confident in that.

  I explicitly said rent control is a band-aid and I gave solutions to literally every “problem” you brought up in the study such as higher rent for uncontrolled units (control them all)

  lower mobility (that’s a good thing meaning people get evicted less),

  I think you might actually be ignorant enough to not know what this means. Social mobility doesn’t eviction, it means people being able to change their socioeconomic status over time. If there was no social mobility then people in poverty will literally never be able to get out of it. How can you possibly talk about a concept you don’t even understand?

  Half of your original claim was that it does nothing to solve rent prices, and your own source claims that you’re wrong on that, and you have the ballz to be here questioning my sourcing abilities lmao

  You provided a single paper, that doesn’t claim what you said it did (because you clearly didn’t read it), gave me a source dumb that you got from chatGPT when you explicitly refused to provide sources when I debunked your narrative about the Soviet housing model, and you’re still actively avoiding telling me what claims you want sourced after I told that you that I’m more than happy to provide sources. It sounds like you’re afraid that you’ll look small if I started sourcing my claims because you know you have nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably fertilizer tbh, but capitalism always likes to steal the glory from technological progress

  What are you even on about? Modern synthetic fertilizer, which is what’s responsible for the dramatic increase in food production, is quite literally a product of capitalist innovation in 19th and 20th century Western Europe and North America. Just about every single major development was researched, developed, replicated, applied, and mass produced in capitalist societies.

  claims to be freedom although nearly everyone is poor and forced to work for slave wages.

  This is nonsensical ideological drivel. Reality is actually quite different. Capitalism has brought up the global standards of living to such a degree that extreme poverty is now almost eliminated. We went from having around 90% of the global population living in extreme poverty just 200 years ago to around 10% now. That is a massive shift. What caused it? Capitalism. Want examples? Look at what happened in China after they adopted capitalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s or Western Europe after WWII or Japan after WWII or South Korea after the Korean war or Singapore and Hong Kong post British control. Just about every country that has adopted capitalism has seen their standard of living improve.

  Then capitalists point to the most authoritarian countries in history and say, see socialism sucks.

  Can you point to any Marxist state that did not end up being authoritarian? Because history seems to show there’s a pretty strong correlation between the two.

  Funny how capitalists always ignore the good socialist societies that are highly regulated free markets with strong workers and consumer protection laws and fairly high taxes and strong welfare states

  You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about because socialist societies, by definition, do NOT have free markets whatsoever, they don’t have taxes, they don’t consumer protection laws, and they don’t welfare programs. These are exclusively capitalist concepts. Socialism is, again, by definition, a centrally planned economy where the “public” (read: government) own all the means of production. Since they control all the resources, revenue, and production, they don’t need to tax, provide protection laws, have free markets, or provide welfare programs… they just directly allocate the resources. If you think Norway or Denmark are socialist then you’re not qualified enough for this discussion, because these are capitalist societies through and through.

  they ignore all the terrible capitalist societies all over the world.

  Nobody is ignoring bad societies, but what we’re looking at here is trends among economic systems, and the data is crystal clear that capitalist societies fair far better than their socialist counterparts. This implies that one system is better than the other, and it is based on the results.

  It’s a miracle that a capitalist economy isn’t a miserable shit hole

  but that requires self awareness and actually researching and educating yourself, not listening to some dick in a 15,000 dollar suit, from a corporate funded think tank thats only job is to push capitalist propaganda, or distract people from realizing socialism is better.

  This is just arrogance that comes from ignorance, which is the worst kind of all. You think way too highly of yourself. Do you honestly think you know better than the tens of thousands of economists all over the world who specialize in this field? Do you think you’re bullshit research of lazily scrolling through propaganda on Lemmy or Youtube is more valid than the field of economics vast amounts wisdom, research, and knowledge that been accumulating for decades, if not centuries? Get real. Just because you listen to some sleazebag propagandist and shills who push the shitty ideology of socialism, doesn’t mean you can project that on to everybody else who doesn’t buy into the same nonsense you bought into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Capitalism is not a static system. It’s incredible power comes from the competition between different forces vying to get an advantage over the others. Workers, the government, businesses, investors are all competing to get what’s best for them. Regulations have to be fought for and protected by every generation. So things like education and participating in civic responsibilities are crucial. It’s similar to democracy, keeping capitalism well regulated is like keeping a democratic society free, it’s something that has to always be actively sought after. That’s how it’s meant to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Colonialism is not a product of capitalism or vice versa. If anything, capitalist principles are what led to the end of colonialism after WWII. Free trade and global integration is what ended the era of colonialism. This of course not mentioning that Marxist countries like the Soviet Union had colonies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is a product of capitalist innovation

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The only thing your source says is “Some are seasonal homes, some are undergoing renovations, and others are simply being held as investments.” it does not provide a number or a link.

  This was your exact statement. You said the article didn’t provide a link to specific numbers or the original study, so I went backed and looked, and it was linked right at the beginning. I went and looked at the study and found out that they didn’t have specific info for renovations, the article just listed it as just one example for vacancies. So out of courtesy, I went out of my way to provide you a source for the info you specifically asked for.

  But you’re not worth any courtesy or effort. Like what the fuck is your problem? This was meant to be a lighthearted discussion, why are you acting like you got log jammed up your ass? Like holy shit do you sound like an absolutely insufferable douche. But you know what, you’re absolutely right, this conversation is not worth continuing. You’re not worth my time, so piss off asshole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in like 2012, a gaming journalist would write an honest review of a game they tried or they would give an update on the industry or they would share interesting tips and info about certain games and franchises. The sites would clean, maybe a couple of ads here and there, but the overall atmosphere is driven by genuine passion.

  Today, you don’t get any of that. Instead you get an advertisement masquerading as an article. The reviews aren’t authentic, the updates are basically a part of marketing campaigns, and the info they give is to push readers to buy something. The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed. Why would anybody go there anymore? Might as well just go see a youtube review or get the game and try it out yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I literally provided a source lmfao

  You specifically said that it was empirically proven that labor is the only source of value in the economy, and the paper you provided wasn’t a study with empirically evidence, but a response paper that didn’t make this claim to begin with.

  you can go through the references of the paper I sent such as the Zacchariah multi-country study.

  I’m not going to do that. That’s not how providing sources work. If you want to provide a source, then you cite specific sources that support specific claims, and have to quote or point out specific parts of those sources that are relevant to the conversation. What you’re doing here is just lazy, it’s the equivalent of some MAGA boomer going “do your own research”.

  If neoliberal economists had any sort of empirical proof showing otherwise, they’d be more than happy to share it, but there are no studies in the academia providing this. Please search them for me if you will.

  No, they wouldn’t. Academia doesn’t work like Lemmy. There’s no team “Marxists” vs team “neoliberals” like you seem to think. Academics are not going to endlessly go back and forth arguing about politics because that’s a waste of their time. They have job duties to fulfill, and they will only ever respond to a paper if it either advances their career or is a defense of their work. No serious academic will ever respond to this paper outside of the original authors because they have to defend their reputation. The lack of responses is not an indication that team Marxism won the argument. That’s a debate bro mindset, not a professional academic mindset.

  As for references for why you’re wrong, you can go through Albert Szymanski’s “human rights in the Soviet Union”, Robert B Allen’s “Farm to Factory”, Pat Sloan’s “Soviet Democracy” or Alec Nove’s “economic history of the USSR” (paraphrasing the title of the last one because I read it long ago). You can go through my comment history and find references to all of those books if you want

  Yeah… no, that’s not how this works. What you’re doing here is just source dumping. Spamming a bunch of random article titles means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t make you right or look smart, it just shows that for a way out while saving face… which is fine, if you can’t handle this discussion then you’re free to end it, but at least have the honesty to do so directly.

  In the off chance that I’m wrong, which I highly doubt, and you actually want to provide sources then you’re going to have to do what I mentioned earlier AND you also have to explain how any of these sources are relevant to the discussion, as in you have to actually explain which claims you’re using the source to support or disprove. Then, and only then, can we actually start talking about credibility of your sources, the merits of their content, and how the shifts the discussion.

  However, if you’re not planning to do that and you’re just willing to insulting shit like asking me to go look through your comment history or go through your source dump without any having any connections to this discussion, then you have nothing of value to say and this conversation is not worth continuing any further.

  but I have nothing to prove to you.

  That’s literally the whole point of this discussion. Keep in mind, you replied to me, you started this discussion. You chose to state your views. If you can’t defend your claims against such mild criticism that then that means you’re simply incapable of defending your beliefs.

  I gave you a summary paper collecting references several studies on labour theory of value

  But it doesn’t support what you claimed it did…

  When you actually bring up sources to the conversation you may change my mind and make me do the effort, but you won’t do that I bet.

  I’m not you, name me the claims you want sourced and I will gladly provide you relevant sources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You, on the other hand, are very dumb, because if you continue reading that very sentence and the one after it:

  …it also results in a number of undesired effects, including, among others, higher rents for uncontrolled units, lower mobility and reduced residential construction. These unintended effects counteract the desired effect, thus, diminishing the net benefit of rent control.

  This directly supports my claim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moon talk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ll regulated capitalism is unironically the greatest human innovation. I’m glad the world is not as brain dead as Lemmy on this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, so we agree that there is a problem then.

  The source of the disagreement isn’t that there isn’t a problem, but what the source of the problem is and how we should go about addressing it.

  You mean vacation homes. People who own multiple properties so that can sit vacant the majority of the year.

  Only 4.6% of the housing stock in the US are second homes (source). Even if they were all available, that’s not enough to make a dent in the housing market. Not to mention that most of these homes are in states like Vermont, Maine, and West Virginia where the housing crises is not the worse because houses there are cheaper than elsewhere and the demand is lower than elsewhere.

  it does not provide a number or a link.

  It does provide a link to a study actually, check again.

  2 houses undergoing renovations counts as “some”.

  Different source, but the number of vacant houses held by investors is around 880,000 or 63% of vacant houses in the country (source). There’s no data for renovations specifically, but a portion of this figure would fall under that category.

  That’s exactly the fucking problem. Yes.

  It’s a factor, but there’s still not enough vacant units held by investors to meet demand. We have an actual housing shortage.

  So we agree that the majority of rental properties are owned by a landlord that is making life objectively worse for people?

  No, we don’t. I agree that some landlords are slum lords and they’re bad, and I also agree that a lot of corporate landlords aren’t great, but landlords are like any other other service providers, there’s good and bad.

  Then we should do something about that instead of clutching pearls about the 1% of houses owned by “mom and pop landlord”

  This is just false. Small rental properties are defined as buildings that have 1-4 units, they make up 46% of the rental market in the US, and over 70% are own by private individuals, and around 70% are managed by the same owners (source). That’s a pretty significant portion.

  I have family members who are exactly the type of people you are talking about. They own a rental property and take care of it and their renters. If suddenly they couldn’t do that anymore they would be fine. The property is not their livelihood, it’s an investment.

  Speak for yourself. You can’t make sweeping generalizations or conclusions off of your anecdotes. I know a few people who own duplex and triplexes, and they would literally be homeless if they did not have their tenants helping them out. You’re oversimplifying things to fuel a narrative you subscribe to rather than looking at things through an objective lens.

  Property can be affordable or be an investment, not both. I’m arguing that it should be affordable (being a basic requirement for survival and all). People using it as an investment can go invest somewhere else.

  Property can be both because there are different types of property. When it comes to housing specifically, if we want average homes to become more affordable and remove the investment aspect of them then we have to build new houses. We have to build so many new houses that not only do we fill up the inventory shortage and meet demand, but go far beyond that to the point where we turn the housing market into a buyer’s market forcing sellers and developers to compete. That’s how we can get a plentiful supply, that’s genuinely affordable for middle class and working class people.

  There’s a reason rent seeking behavior is a derogatory term.

  This term is defining certain behaviors that are unethical, harmful, and immoral. The actual concept of renting itself is fine. You’re paying a fee to a get a service, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again

  Source: Dude, trust me

  Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper.

  I know that you just linked the very first link on google that appeals to your confirmation bias, because based on the content of this paper, you 100% did not read it.

  First of all, this is not a study. It’s a response paper by 3 Marxist academics to another study that they disagreed with. Second of all, at no point in this response do they ever make the claim that labor is the only source of value in an economy. They just argue that it is a significant factor of value, which was supposedly not factored in the study they’re critiquing. So you saying that they argued that “labour is the only source of value” is just you making things up. Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers except for the authors of the original study being critiqued, and that only ever happens on occasion. So this is not the smoking gun you think it is.

  Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.

  You won’t provide anything, ever, because you have nothing. You’re just straight up factually wrong on this.

  I’m actually not gonna bother giving you references because you’re just a blatant anticommunist making stuff up

  …and there it is! You tried googling for anything to confirm your biases, but you couldn’t find anything because you’re wrong. Instead of being honest and admitting that you’re wrong, you did what all Marxists do and made up the lamest excuse imaginable as to why you can’t provide sources for your own claims. You can’t even defend what you say. This is just sad dude.

  I’m not going to change the mind of someone who doesn’t listen to facts.

  Your grand rebuttal is just you saying that I’m wrong without even providing any substance, you’re not able to provide sources because there’s nothing that supports what you say, and you can’t even elaborate on your own opinions. Yeah, I’m totally the one who doesn’t listen to facts, get real.

  Go on licking your landlord’s boots (or leeching off your tenants if you’re lucky).

  Look, Bart just did the thing! When a Marxist is called out on their bullshit and they’re clearly proven to be wrong, they can’t be honest and admit they’re wrong, that’s would be acting in good faith and that’s just against the core of the ideology. Therefore, you have to come up with any lame ass pejorative or insult to shut down the conversation without addressing anything. That way you get to feel like a pseudo intellectual without actually accepting your ignorance. Classic Marxism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Rent control obviously reduces prices.

  Here’s an actual study’s conclusion on the matter:

  In this study, I examine a wide range of empirical studies on rent control published in referred journals between 1967 and 2023. I conclude that, although rent control appears to be very effective in achieving lower rents for families in controlled units, its primary goal, it also results in a number of undesired effects, including, among others, higher rents for uncontrolled units, lower mobility and reduced residential construction. These unintended effects counteract the desired effect, thus, diminishing the net benefit of rent control. Therefore, the overall impact of rent control policy on the welfare of society is not clear. (source)

  This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can’t rise above CPI.

  Soaring home rental prices are affecting all of Spain: almost 40% exceed 1,500 euros a month

  The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime.

  Source: Dude, trust me

  I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  That’s such a backwards take. Of course it’s a bad thing. There’s more people that want houses than there are available units. Developers won’t build new ones because there’s no incentivize to do so. It’s in their best interest to hold to artificially restrict supply and jack up prices every time a new tenant moves in. So you end up with higher rents and less units.

  treating as a commodity instead of as a human right.

  This is just moronic at this point. It’s crystal clear that you’re just repeating because you think it’s sounds virtuous, but you haven’t given a single thought as to what that even means and you won’t ever provide any explanation. If you apply the most elementary level of logic, anybody could understand that a house, including public houses, is something that costs money because it requires resources, time, and labor to make. Because of this, it is something that has to be traded for one way or another, and thus it is a commodity. Slapping the “human rights” label next to it is not going to change this reality.

  It’s the only model that has abolished homelessness in history

  Source: Dude, trust me

  Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income

  This has already been debunked. The fact that you keep repeating just shows that you’re disingenuous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family.

  You’re correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.

  So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?

  All of the above, but also, by far the single biggest reason why house prices have gone up is because we haven’t been building enough houses to meet demand. If you look up the US housing inventory over time, you’ll basically see that it has basically collapsed since the great recession to near all time lows. In the meantime, this country’s population has grown quite a bit since then, we’ve added well over 20 million people since 2010. So there you have it, that’s the root cause. If we built houses as the same rates as we have in decades past, we would be an experiencing a housing boom right now reverse the current seller’s market into a buyer’s market.

  There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.

  It’s actually more nuanced than that. The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia or they’re undergoing renovations ((source)[www.realtor.com/…/states-with-most-vacant-homes/]). There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments, but the number of actually vacant units are smaller than a lot of people think. As for the ones that being held for investment, it’s not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it’s massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.

  If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well

  If you want to make the argument that corporations should be banned or greatly limited to buying residential housing, then I agree with you. However, that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right

  So is food and water, but we still pay for them. It doesn’t take an economist to understand that it takes a lot of capital and labor to get these things to us, and these require money. Therefore, they have to be traded for to cover the costs. In this case, it’s by paying a fee.

  It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.

  This is ignorant because it assumes that rental market is static, when in fact, it is very much dynamic. How expensive or affordable rent is depends on things like supply, demand, and policy.

  it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work

  Who told you this? This is just wrong. This is the issue with Marxism as an ideology, it’s entirely a built on a house of cards. It’s entirely on baseless assumptions built on other baseless assumptions. Simply insisting that landlords don’t do anything without providing any substance is not a valid argument, that just the assertion fallacy.

  Landlord do actually do stuff. They’re responsible for their property. This means they have to put in the work in maintaining it, not only to preserve their property’s value, but also because they’re liable if their property causes harm to their tenants or anybody else. Landlords are responsible for things like

  • Repairs for any structural decay, damage, or malfunction (this ranges from changing light bulbs to changing the entire heating system)

  • General maintenance like snow removal, pest removal, the general appearance of the building

  • All the legal mumbo jumbo like drafting up the leases, following regulations, and meeting safety standards

  • All the finances of the building, this is especially true for multifamily buildings. They have to pay for the sewage and water, because they’re shared by the whole building as well as the common electricity (usually has it’s own panel). They also have to deal with the hassle of paying the taxes and house insurance on the building.

  • Tenant relations, again this is especially true for multifamily buildings. Landlords have to be able to settle disputes and complaints between their tenants, and they have to be willing to take legal action against tenants that are causing harm to the others

  This is all stuff that tenants would have to personally deal with if they owned property, but because they’re renting all of it get outsourced to the landlords. However, all of these involve the tenants actually being in the building. If there’s a vacant unit, the landlord is also responsible for inspecting the unit, cleaning it, advertising the vacancy, screening applicants, and signing the new tenants.

  You might scoff at this as nothing, but it’s actually really annoying time consuming. So much so that there’s an entire industry that revolves around property management. There’s a reason why even rich people sometimes opt to rent instead of just buying a new place. To some people the hassle of owning and maintaining a property is just not worth it.

  We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.

  I’m aware, and Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true. Labor is just one component in the economy, not the only one. An economy needs capital, leadership, entrepreneurship, specialization (education/expertise), and innovation on top of labor to function.

  As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income.

  It’s funny you say this because this show that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Three things:

  1. Soviet workers didn’t have a normal income like we do. Their incomes were centrally planned by the government, and they were distributed as a part of national budgeting scheme. Soviet incomes were not based on merit, demand, experience, or specialization but on administrative policy. This means that a doctor and a factory worker got paid a similar amounts, and Soviet salaries were notorious for being very low.

  2. The Soviet Union actually set the rents via policy. A part of the reason why the predetermined government salaries were so low is because so many things were heavily subsidized, including housing. That was the government’s grand argument as to why people got next to nothing, they argued that they’re getting benefits elsewhere. Now, the government decided they would impose a symbolic 3-6% (depends on the regions) rental fee to remind people that housing was allocated, not owned, and could be revoked and reassigned at any time.

  3. The Soviet Union solution to housing is one of the most historically famous examples of failure. They central government was very inefficient and ignorant in their planning. They allocated a lot of resources to build factories but barely any for houses for the workers that moved there, they set out of touch housing quotas that did not align with local needs, and they were rigid and uncoordinated in their execution which led to a lot of poor quality buildings and a lot of delays. The buildings that did get built were plagued with mismanaged, poor maintenance, and extremely long wait lists. You might not know this, but the Soviet housing model that you idolize actually had a lot, and I mean a lot, of housing shortages. That system collapsed for a reason.

  Keep in mind, I am not against the idea of public housing. I do think that government has role to play in helping solve the housing crises. There are some people who lack the means to ever get housing on their own regardless of how affordable the market is, and those people should get government subsidized housing. However, this means that public housing should only apply to a specific subsection of the population, not the whole population. Trying to centrally control and plan the housing market will just lead to a fiasco similar what the Soviet Union experienced. That’s a not a real solution, that’s just introducing a host of unnecessary problems.

  Our current system works, it’s been proven to work. What it needs is some tweaks and updates to get it back on track. It’s really not that complicated, we have a housing shortage, so we need to build way more houses. We want lower prices, so have to build so many units that the supply eclipses the demand. We want more dense, less car centric housing, then we have to update our zoning laws to allow it. We want to speed things up, so we have to remove obstacles standing in the way like unnecessarily long approval processes for new construction.

  We can’t cling on to failed ideologies like Marxism as some sort of new and innovative solution, because it’s not. Marxism is a proven failure, and that won’t change this time or the next. If we want to get anything done we have to remain practical, nuanced, realistic, knowledgeable, precise with our discourse and policy. That’s our only way forward.

  We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant

  You never explained why you think this is the case, you just insist that it is by constantly repeating it. Tell me the specific mechanics that you believe make private renting inherently unfair or exploitative, because I don’t see any legitimate case for this position.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.

  Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.

  Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There’s a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.

  Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We’ve seen it work countless times. Actually we’re seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they’re rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.

  The complaints are about the scale of people who are opting to turn their units into Airbnbs, which takes them off the rental market, which deceases supply, and thus increases prices. You’ll almost never hear somebody complain about how someone turning their property into a hotel is an inherently bad idea.

  You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.

  I disagree with this premise. I don’t think that renting is inherently toxic, abusive, or exploitative. There’s no valid argument to argue as such. Property is a commodity, those who have excess of this commodity are opening it up for others to use for a fee. That’s a service, and just like any other service there’s nothing wrong with it. I also think that you’re misguidedly assuming that only poor people rent, which is not true. There’s an absolutely massive luxury rental market as there is one for every budget and style. It truly is a market, and like all markets, it’s still dictated by the law of supply and demand.

  I think the crux of our disagreement stems from the fact that I think our housing crises stem from poor and outdated policy, not from an economic system. Capitalism has been proven to be extremely effective at efficient mass production, so why is this not the case for housing? It’s because we have backwards housing policy. It takes years, sometimes even decades, for any developer to get their project approved. It takes a lot of money to go through all the legal proceeding, lawsuits, fees, and demands made by the town/city. Even if the developer finally gets to the point where they can finally start building, they’re still now allowed by law to build mixed units or multifamily units, they have to build either single family homes or strip malls. Not only that, but a big percentage of the property has to be dedicated to parking spaces, again this is by law. Even if the developer complies with all these nonsensical laws, demands, pays the fees, and spends years going through the process… the whole thing can be killed at any moment by NIMBYs for the dumbest reasons. This is why we have a housing crises.

  You want to fix the housing market? Do what Austin has been doing for the past decade. For whatever reason, it seems like they’re only ones in the country who figured out that if they make the development process easier, reform their zoning laws, and incentivized developers to build, they can build so many new units that they supply of housing not only meets demands by exceeds it, thus leading to a decrease in prices. Austin has seen pretty substantial decreases in both rents and house prices, and the trend is not slowing down (source). The average rent of a 2 bedroom apartment there is around $1400, which is well below the national average of $1630 (source). Keep in mind, that Austin is a big and growing city, and yet they’re prices have nearly dropped to prepandemic levels. Clearly they’re doing something right, and the rest of us need to follow their lead.

  That’s sounds to me like a way more grounded, nuanced, practical, and realistic plan and approach than just simply insisting that renting as a concept is bad because Marxism insists that capitalism is bad, and therefore we should get rid of it and replace it with a system that’s proven to be worse. A rigid ideology that’s built on a house of cards made up of baseless assumptions and relies and the most extreme option at every turn shouldn’t have any place in modern discourse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s definitely a factor, but our housing supply is largely self inflected with outdated and poorly thought out zoning laws. Developers can’t build anything because the process to build anything takes years (sometimes decades), a fuck ton of money before they even break ground, and the law requires literally requires them to dedicate a certain ratio of their property (sometimes half) for parking. Not only that but so many projects get easily killed by NIMBYs for dumbest reasons. It’s no wonder we have shortage.

  If we look at places that are building a shit ton of units, like Austin, the prices are actually going down and have been for years. Both the rent prices and house prices have gone down in Austin because, for whatever reason, they’re the only ones that figured out that the way to solving a housing crises is to pump the supply to the point where it exceeds demand, thus causing prices to fall. That’s what we need nationwide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is nonsense, there’s ZERO merit to rent control in 2025. It is a proven failure. There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues. In fact it does the opposite, it strangles supply by disincentivizing developers from building new units and it jacks up prices by incentivizing landlords to increase prices every time they get a new tenant, and by extension it also incentivizes landlords to continuously seek out new tenants for this purpose.

  Rent control directly benefits your average landlord and hurts the average tenant. People have to incredibly misguided to still push for it. Massive corporations like Blackrock are unaffected by these policies. They’ll profit either way because they control way more than just real estate. Their issue is not market incentives, it’s accountability. So no your grandparents owning a triplex and renting out two units doesn’t put them on the same team as Blackrock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand what their ideology is, I’m making the point that it’s stupid and illogical.

  I personally think it’s a bit melodramatic. There’s a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.

  I agree with you, but that’s also kind of my point. I don’t have an issue with nuanced takes like this. There’s clearly a difference between mom and pop landlords who own duplexes or a second house to help them out and Blackrock buying up entire neighborhoods to purposefully manipulate market prices. We can agree that the former is fine, and the latter isn’t. But at the same time we can also acknowledge that the issue is not inherent to markets, private ownership, or renting, these bad practices are a byproduct of poor policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Landlords are parasites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I never understood this brain dead obsession that Marxists have with landlords.

  Landlords own property like anybody else does or could, and they use their property to offer a commodity in demand a for a fee like any other service. You never hear anybody complaining about a car rental service or hotels or any other rental service, just this one. This is a strong sign that it’s not based in any merit, it’s just ideological brain rot.

  You could be nuanced and argue that certain types of landlords are bad or that certain practices are harmful, and that’s fine, but to say the concept of people renting out housing units is inherently bad just because is just stupid. Renting has it’s advantages even if you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge them, there’s are plenty of reasons why renting exists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I will be taking no followup questions. Thank you for your time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure there was research done that showed that people who are hypothetically transported back in time, won’t be able to make any meaningful contributions to the era they go to. They will just end up integrating in that the society of that era.

  Basically if you go back in time to medieval Europe, you could introduce something like paperclips to society, but you won’t be able to introduce things like computers even if you know how they work and how to use them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just like in the movies.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How would I know it’s Mexico if it’s not yellow?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Calling out people for making stuff up is not sea lioning

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree, the Republicans ARE a cabal of idiots. The people who own them and run the party in the shadows, however, are not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I take issue with your question because it conflates two completely separate things as the same. There’s a very difference between a “system” and an “individual”, especially when that person is a private citizen. Ideally, political violence should be a line that’s never crossed, however, we don’t live in an ideal world. If people are tired of the system they live under, and they have no meaningful way of getting change then violence might be inevitable. However, in these cases people go after the system itself. That means the actual institutions that keep the system in place. Want an example? Look at what’s happening right now in Nepal.

  What you don’t do to fight a system is shoot a private citizen over their political views. That’s not meaningful resistance, that’s just violence. It doesn’t do anything or change anything, all it does is help establish a dangerous precedent where violence becomes an acceptable part of political discourse. Don’t like someone’s political views? Shoot them, they probably deserved it anyway… at least that’s what people here are saying to justify it, but what these don’t understand is that it’s a two way street. Just as you cheer and condone political violence, others can as well, including the people you don’t like. You can’t condemn people you don’t like for doing it but then cheer for the same actions when the people you like do it, because you’ll just be a hypocrite and your words will hold no weight. It’s not a defensible position.

  It should be noted that for any principle to mean anything, it is absolutely mandatory for it to be applied fairly and universally. If we want to remain a society that values civil liberties, then those have to extend to everyone, including those who you don’t like don’t or don’t agree with, and this includes people with vile views. When a system becomes a dysfunctional mess, it means that it has deviated significantly from it’s founding principles, and a new system needs to take it’s place to embody them. However, if the people no longer believe in civil liberties for all, then we’re looking at a very grim future because we would have tyranny’s pandora’s box.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So you can’t cite a specific example? Nobody is disagreeing that Kirk had vile views, but you made a very specific claim that I want verification for. Give me something, anything that directly shows Kirk actually did this:

  He was promoting actual, race-targeted violence domestically and internationally