|
Azhais posted:So your theory is you'd be happy to spend $200k building a house you didn't ultimately own at the end? I mean, that's basically what renting is and people are willing to do that.
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 11:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:25 |
|
|
Alhazred posted:I mean, that's basically what renting is and people are willing to do that. Most people rent because they have to, not because they want to. Often, they can afford monthly payments, but they have no insufficient savings or credit to buy. Sometimes, the reason is less about their economic situation and more about logistics: maybe they don't plan on living in a given place for 20 or 30 years, so they rent a place instead with the intention of moving sooner rather than later.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 14:43
|
|
|
tarlibone posted:Most people rent because they have to, not because they want to. Also most renters seem to end up renting the nicest/least shittiest property they can afford, which is usually not as nice as they would have hoped but just tolerable enough to get by. That also means they're spending right up to their limit which totally destroys any chances of saving enough for a deposit on a house anytime soon. It can take decades to escape the rental trap and most people never make it out. I'm in my late 40s and there's absolutely no chance I'll ever own my own home.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 15:07
|
|
|
pwn posted:Because we like to live in houses? What has that got to do with working in a construction company that builds thousands of houses for others, with no tangible return of any kind? You might build your own house, because you want some place to live, but why would you build houses for someone else without some kind of incentive? You might say that charity is or at least should be incentive enough, but building a house is a major commitment that requires a lot of resources, and is bigger than any one person's charity (well, anyone who isn't a millionaire), even putting aside that the time that would be required to build a good house is something that person could be using to do something else that does directly and tangibly benefit them and/or their family, and is only really feasible for people who are already comfortably well off. Alhazred posted:I mean, that's basically what renting is and people are willing to do that. This is a pretty disingenuous post. Even if someone ends up paying $200k in rent, they do so over decades to benefit themselves and their families, not in the space of a few weeks/months/years to benefit others. Rental payments are a lot more analogous to mortgage payments i.e. payments to own a property, than payments to build a property. tsob fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 15:57
|
|
|
Have a functional welfare state and a regulated housing market, that's at least two silver bullets.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 16:34
|
|
|
Worth also mentioning that mortgages as a whole are their own massive problem. All the value represented by all the money tied up in mortgages is one of the pillars that supports the economy, and the last time something went wrong with that, the whole economy went down, and there's no meaningful measures to prevent another collapse. The pandemic's not great for mortgage payments either. https://twitter.com/HoustonChron/status/1280198158476247040 And then nestled between rental and bank-backed ownership, there's relatively cheap home ownership on rental land, which LWT already covered. Housing is a mess, and the only way it's gonna be fixed is with some kind of government intervention and regulation.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 20:25
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Worth also mentioning that mortgages as a whole are their own massive problem. All the value represented by all the money tied up in mortgages is one of the pillars that supports the economy, and the last time something went wrong with that, the whole economy went down, and there's no meaningful measures to prevent another collapse. The pandemic's not great for mortgage payments either. Norwegian banks actually lowered their interests on mortgages because they realized that it's better that they make a little less money over the economy collapsing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 20:47
|
|
|
tsob posted:What has that got to do with working in a construction company that builds thousands of houses for others, with no tangible return of any kind? You might build your own house, because you want some place to live, but why would you build houses for someone else without some kind of incentive? You might say that charity is or at least should be incentive enough, but building a house is a major commitment that requires a lot of resources, and is bigger than any one person's charity (well, anyone who isn't a millionaire), even putting aside that the time that would be required to build a good house is something that person could be using to do something else that does directly and tangibly benefit them and/or their family, and is only really feasible for people who are already comfortably well off. Here's the return and the incentive: "you get to live in society and have all your other needs taking care of". In exchange you perform useful labour to take care of the needs of others. This stuff is very simple.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Here's the return and the incentive: "you get to live in society and have all your other needs taking care of". In exchange you perform useful labour to take care of the needs of others. This stuff is very simple. That's not decommodifying housing; that's reforming society and the economy entirely, housing included. Which isn't what someone suggested, and I asked about.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:28
|
|
|
Guys, its easy. Just transition to a collectivist utopia in a society with no discernable unified vision but does feature cyclical approbation of counter cultures stretching back for a century. Why can't everyone else see my vision or be as committed to true ideals as I imagine myself?
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:39
|
|
|
tsob posted:It's definitely too radical for me, because I literally have no idea what would even mean. I would assume it means something like "a house no longer has a value", but then, how do you even convince people to build and maintain them en masse, if doing so doesn't have any economic return? Why do people build roads they won't own?
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:44
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Here's the return and the incentive: "you get to live in society and have all your other needs taking care of". In exchange you perform useful labour to take care of the needs of others. That sounds a bit..authoritarian. Like, who's gonna define what is useful labor and what is not?
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:49
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:Why do people build roads they won't own? Money, because the road is a commodity. The government earns money from road users, then uses that to build or maintain new roads, which is done by various contractors who all earn money for those jobs. If a house isn't a commodity, then there's no money involved, so that whole system goes out the window; at least as I understand it. Which is why I asked for clarification on what the original poster meant. If the process still involves money in some form, then it probably isn't that radical frankly.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:54
|
|
|
tsob posted:Money, because the road is a commodity. The government earns money from road users, then uses that to build or maintain new roads, which is done by various contractors who all earn money for those jobs. If a house isn't a commodity, then there's no money involved, so that whole system goes out the window; at least as I understand it. Which is why I asked for clarification on what the original poster meant. If the process still involves money in some form, then it probably isn't that radical frankly. Roads are not a commodity though; you cannot buy and sell roads. They raise money because people use them to get to their jobs, where they earn income which is then taxed. The roads themselves are not raising money on their own, with the exception of toll roads which are relatively rare (and still don't usually fully pay for their own construction and maintenance, it's just an offset, so they would still not be profitable to own). Couldn't the exact same argument be made for housing? The government earns money from people living in houses, because by not being homeless they are more able to pursue lucrative work and build a stronger tax base. Decommodification doesn't mean "make it free", it means eliminating the idea of there being a "marketplace" for it. Public housing is the simplest form of this - the government just builds houses for people with money raised via taxes and then just.... lets people live there. The main obstacle to public housing in the US is the fact that private housing has to compete with it, which real estate developers and landlords don't like because it turns out that existing public housing is on land that has become quite a bit more valuable since that public housing was built, but because it's public housing they aren't allowed to buy it out and hike up the rent. It's a similar problem to the issue with healthcare in the US - the insurance companies hate the idea of a "public option" because they know they won't be able to compete, so they fight tooth and nail to prevent it from coming to be. If you want an example of decommodification, just look at healthcare in basically every other developed country. The specifics of how each country actually handles its healthcare varies, but the end result is that healthcare is not something you have to shop around for - it's just something you inherently have access to as a citizen, regardless of how rich or poor you are.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 23:39
|
|
|
Worth noting that there used to be a lot more private roads back in like the 18th century, and those were made for profit and funded by tolls, but eventually they all went out of business through a combination of government efforts to streamline transit and the entropy of time. A similar thing happened with railroads, eventually the government took control over the network that had largely been made by private enterprise, and then as technology improved and the federal government became more powerful, there were massive federal projects to make most of the infrastructure we now use. People are a lot more heavily invested in housing though. Heavily regulating rent while also working on public housing projects seems like the way to go for now, but that itself has a lot of political pushback. I do kinda wonder what people would plan to do about commercial and industrial buildings in their grand "nationalize land ownership" schemes, since while everyone can understand the need for housing, commercial spaces are a lot more obtuse to figure out what to prioritize.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 00:43
|
|
|
https://youtu.be/3dBaEo4QplQ There are advantages to modern day aristocracy in just the right situations, but monkey's paws world wide salivate at the thought.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 01:10
|
|
|
Who would decide where people could live in these scenarios? If housing becomes free and people decide to flock to the coastal cities, do you keep building housing to accommodate all of them or do you start telling people to gently caress off back to their flyover states where housing is already built and plentiful? Would small towns dying off from their younger population moving away be considered a problem or an opportunity to reclaim more of nature for conservation efforts?
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 13:45
|
|
|
The Cheshire Cat posted:Long explanation A few days late, but thank you for clarifying that for me. It, and the video piL posted make for interesting material to muse over.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2020 22:37
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:Norwegian banks actually lowered their interests on mortgages because they realized that it's better that they make a little less money over the economy collapsing. That's treason, Johnny!
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2020 06:23
|
|
|
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/supreme-court-florida-felons-poll-tax.html Wonder if John will bring this up. Supreme court decided to let Florida's "ex felons need to pay to vote" law stand
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2020 17:27
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:That sounds a bit..authoritarian. Like, who's gonna define what is useful labor and what is not? Lmao yes anarchism is now authoritarian, come the gently caress on. Everyone gets to decide what useful labor is. If there's a big dispute, you have a vote about it. Again, this poo poo is easy. tsob posted:That's not decommodifying housing; that's reforming society and the economy entirely, housing included. Which isn't what someone suggested, and I asked about. Good luck decommodifying housing, or indeed any loving thing up to and including your own body, as long as you remain within a capitalist system. A system, I will remind you, which depends on commodifying everything. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jul 17, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2020 18:14
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Lmao yes anarchism is now authoritarian, come the gently caress on. I'm not sure my assumltions regarding anarchism directly lead to what you obviously conclude. We may be using different definitions.
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2020 18:23
|
|
|
Azhais posted:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/supreme-court-florida-felons-poll-tax.html What's even worse is that they can't even tell the ex-felons how much they would need to pay to clear the debt and be eligble to vote again. Not "they won't", they straight up can't, because their records are sketchy as gently caress. It would take years to figure out and work through the backlog.
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2020 18:51
|
|
|
Azhais posted:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/supreme-court-florida-felons-poll-tax.html Poll tax, poll tax, how I love ya, how I love ya, my dear old poll tax. This is another in a long series of court decisions where the Supreme Court has been the enemy of democracy by refusing to stop blatant attempts to unlawfully restrict voting, and here they're reinforcing the prison industrial system as a way to permanently disenfranchise people. That'll make dismantling the prison system even more politically difficult. Orange Devil posted:Good luck decommodifying housing, or indeed any loving thing up to and including your own body, as long as you remain within a capitalist system. A system, I will remind you, which depends on commodifying everything. If you demand that the entirety of society immediately deconstruct itself to rebuild everything from scratch before any reforms on any singular issues can ever be made, and you'll just get angry at anyone who has any hesitance, you're not in favor of any reform, you're in favor of constructing unreachable goals so that you can complain infinitely about how those goals remain unreached.
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2020 19:11
|
|
|
Good episode this week. I like the idea of using trusted authority figures from other fields to try and combat conspiracy theory garbage, but I'm kinda doubtful how well it'd work. I'm sure we all know at least one person who's in deep with this stuff and trying to argue/reason/nudge people away from it just feels so futile.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 02:11
|
|
|
His mentioning of believing a conspiracy theory about Princess Di reminds me of a book I read back in the mid 00s about debunking conspiracy theories. Except that when the author got to the section about 9/11 truthers he starts talking about how they actually have some reasonable ideas, thus undercutting the entire concept of the book.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 03:08
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:If you demand that the entirety of society immediately deconstruct itself to rebuild everything from scratch before any reforms on any singular issues can ever be made, and you'll just get angry at anyone who has any hesitance, you're not in favor of any reform, you're in favor of constructing unreachable goals so that you can complain infinitely about how those goals remain unreached.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 04:07
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:If you demand that the entirety of society immediately deconstruct itself to rebuild everything from scratch before any reforms on any singular issues can ever be made, and you'll just get angry at anyone who has any hesitance, you're not in favor of any reform, you're in favor of constructing unreachable goals so that you can complain infinitely about how those goals remain unreached. Thank you for putting this into a single sentence. And yeah, lots of folks on this very board who need to hear that. muscles like this! posted:His mentioning of believing a conspiracy theory about Princess Di reminds me of a book I read back in the mid 00s about debunking conspiracy theories. Except that when the author got to the section about 9/11 truthers he starts talking about how they actually have some reasonable ideas, thus undercutting the entire concept of the book. Oliver didn't actually suggest that the Princess Di conspiracy theory was real though. He used it as an example of why people believe conspiracy theories even when there's no evidence.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 13:50
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:If you demand that the entirety of society immediately deconstruct itself to rebuild everything from scratch before any reforms on any singular issues can ever be made, and you'll just get angry at anyone who has any hesitance, you're not in favor of any reform, you're in favor of constructing unreachable goals so that you can complain infinitely about how those goals remain unreached. Indeed I am not in favor of reform, for the reason that reform will not work. Similar to how reforming the police will not work. It is reform which constructs unreachable goals which you can complain infinitely about. You cannot build a functioning society on rotten fundamentals.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 15:36
|
|
|
It's frustrating and sad how so many politicians (primarily the ones who already sold out what little was left of their personal values to follow their pissbaby master) are so steadfastly against taking any real measures against the Coronovirus Pandemic, so the problem will keep getting worse and worse and America will continue to lag behind the rest of the world because its leaders have totally failed it. And then the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories reflects a lot of what has driven American politics wrong for a long while now, the fact that people will just shop around for alternative facts that tell them nicer things when the real facts get uncomfortable or demand action. There are so drat many stories out there that go "Covid is a hoax! I'm not wearing a facemask, and I'm going to hang out in small areas with many others!" "I think I got a flu or something, I'm having a hard time breathing!" "Man, having Covid sucks!" and then funeral. Orange Devil posted:Indeed I am not in favor of reform, for the reason that reform will not work. Similar to how reforming the police will not work. I'm doubtful about the feasibility of swapping out all the fundamentals of everyone in society at once, and the ability to construct a whole new world order from scratch. But even more than that, turning every issue into the largest thing possible instead of breaking it down into smaller achievable steps is a way of never getting anything done in normal everyday life, so by extension it's not gonna get much done on the national stage to shoot to overthrow the entire system all at once instead of addressing individual problems one by one. Or at the very least, it'll take a much longer time to make progress on any given issues, like at least an order of magnitude longer.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 18:35
|
|
|
Were the Tuskeegee airmen and the syphilis experiment linked other than geography and subjects?
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 18:58
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:And then the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories reflects a lot of what has driven American politics wrong for a long while now, the fact that people will just shop around for alternative facts that tell them nicer things when the real facts get uncomfortable or demand action. There are so drat many stories out there that go "Covid is a hoax! I'm not wearing a facemask, and I'm going to hang out in small areas with many others!" "I think I got a flu or something, I'm having a hard time breathing!" "Man, having Covid sucks!" and then funeral. It is honestly so frustrating how common this story is. How many times do people have to put their hands on the hot stove before people stop thinking "I should put my hand on that stove"? It's like people have just lost their ability to learn from the mistakes of others and always think it will be different for them somehow.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 20:24
|
|
|
The thing is... sometimes I'm an idiot and doing 5 things at once and put my hand on the hot stove (or rather, grab a hpt handle/lid). Which is really the point. Conspiracy theories sneak in and surprise people when they're freaking out or angry or stressed or whatever. The simplest explanation for conspiracy theories I've heard is that its when people have having a hard time making sense of things so they accept an "easier" answer. And people who think they're not susceptible to them or too smart for them are probably like people who think advertising can't work on them. Like when that judge in Jersey's family was targeted a bunch of goons went RIGHT to "Hillary had them killed" and got defensive that "no, it make sense because its something she'd do." You just gotta be smart and question yourself when you start believing some poo poo because "it feels right" instead of because there's actual evidence.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 20:33
|
|
|
STAC Goat posted:The thing is... sometimes I'm an idiot and doing 5 things at once and put my hand on the hot stove (or rather, grab a hpt handle/lid). Yeah that's a good recent example because didn't it turn out to be some guy who had pre-existing hate for that judge and wasn't related to Epstein at all? I do understand the instinct to see conspiracy in that kind of thing though, because combine that with a general mistrust of cops (which is completely warranted) and the initial explanation that comes out that seems to wrap everything up in a nice little bow just feels too convenient, like it is itself the "easier" answer. Humans do have a way of trying to find patterns in chaos though and sometimes something being convenient for powerful people doesn't actually mean they caused it to happen. Sometimes people just get lucky.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 21:00
|
|
|
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/trump-john-yoo-lawyer-torture-waterboarding Looking forward to the next Trump update on the show
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 21:01
|
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:Were the Tuskeegee airmen and the syphilis experiment linked other than geography and subjects? No. Only one of the syphilis subjects was a veteran, and IIRC, had no connection to the fliers.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2020 22:18
|
|
|
muscles like this! posted:Except that when the author got to the section about 9/11 truthers he starts talking about how they actually have some reasonable ideas, thus undercutting the entire concept of the book. Okay, so one thing I never understood though. Why can't you see any debris from the plane in the pictures of the Pentagon?
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2020 06:52
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I'm doubtful about the feasibility of swapping out all the fundamentals of everyone in society at once, and the ability to construct a whole new world order from scratch. Look I get your logic, it's very understandable and seems highly sensible at first glance. And yet, *points at loving everything* look at the state of all this poo poo. And it's been like this forever. And you know, revolutions have happened before, they aren't fiction. My entire lifetime has been one of sliding backwards. The incremental change I have lived is primarily that of problems getting bigger, things that were built in the past getting broken down and nobody with power doing a goddamn thing to address the big looming threats of our age. If they even recognize those exist, rather than straight up denying the truth. So the practical result of your approach, as sensible as it may seem, is less than zero.
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2020 08:45
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Look I get your logic, it's very understandable and seems highly sensible at first glance. And yet, *points at loving everything* look at the state of all this poo poo. And it's been like this forever. And you know, revolutions have happened before, they aren't fiction. Your assumption here is that things are somehow worse then before, I usually find that comes from people not really understanding how bad things were. The progression of civil rights alone in past 30 has been vast. Things weren't better before you just didn't know how bad they were.,
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2020 08:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:25 |
|
|
socialsecurity posted:Your assumption here is that things are somehow worse then before, I usually find that comes from people not really understanding how bad things were. The progression of civil rights alone in past 30 has been vast. Things weren't better before you just didn't know how bad they were., While the current state may be better, than 30 years ago, it feels the direction is only getting worse. As in we made progress compared to 30 years ago, buy lately have been regressing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2020 17:56
|
|
