But on the bright side. umm. Ecomomny
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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"As you lay starving, homeless, and destitute tonight, take solace in the fact that the top 500 corporations have never been this profitable"
yaaay dow and stuff so happy
I really don’t know what the corpo end goal is, like what everyone homeless, and them owning a bunch of empty, condemned buildings? This whole thing is nightmarish. I always hear talk about increasing low income housing but never any talk of middle income. I make a decent wage but could never afford anything without roommates and even that is a stretch. Wheeeeeeeee.
Capitalism doesn't function in a way that has a "grand plan" that takes the whole picture into account, it's not incentivised to care about collective sustainability.
The best (profit maximising) way for a single company to operate is to pay as little as possible to employees, and to charge as much as possible to customers.
With all companies collectively doing this, charging more and paying less, then eventually nobody will have anything left and the market will as a whole collapse, but even if organisations can predict this and see it is coming, which they surely can, they are individually disincentivised to change, and will not change.
it’s not incentivised to care about collective sustainability.
Not only collective. Most companies don't even care about their own sustainability.
CEOs working there for some years try to inflate short term 'shareholder value' to maximize their bonuses.
The shareholders no longer see themselves as owners who collect dividends but as investors who can just sell their stocks if the price increases.
What happens to the company 5 or 10 years down the road doesn't matter.
The problem is greed, period.
People want more than what they have and will do anything to get it including burning down the house around them. The attitude is everywhere in modern society and its a serious problem.
Accepting greed is human nature, the baser issue is a system that rewards it.
There's greed and then there's whatever the fuck a trillionaire is.
It’s so unfortunate too, we could provide that needed incentivization for change through strong consumer-centric regulation, and the corpos would still be making money hand over fist. But, they’ve captured Congress via legalized bribe money, so there’s just nobody home when it comes time to regulate. Washington is willfully asleep at the wheel, dreaming of lining their pockets with “campaign finance donations.”
There isn't a corpo end-goal, corporations follow profits like a zombie seeking a meal. There's no long-term planning, as those in charge can jump ship at the collapse and start something new, using all they've gained.
Mixed with homelessness being a crime sure feels like government is aiming for some slave labor in their prisons
Only in Arizona.
Democratic serfdom. Unless we fall into autocratic governance before that, or (hopefully) liberate ourselves instead.
A different story but Detroit had an issue with housing and laws that prevented certain people from buying homes, getting mortgages, applying for well paying jobs all while getting abused and sometimes killed by the police. Some of those people revolted, not all, not even a significant number. They burned down everything, including the homes they could not buy and it brought down a city.
I could absolutely see this happening again because of abnormal rents. These landlords are going to upset enough people to the point when the group with no hope for their future just starts burning it all down. Why should they care about society when society doesn't care about them? Fire is so easy to start, and as Detroit found out, so hard to stop.
You think people are going to start burning their apartment buildings?
I'm all for chaos and rebuilding apartments makes me money but I'm not sure this is going to become a thing.
Yes I do. They did it before why wouldn't they do it again?
I volunteer to help out in any way that I can
I dunno, the choice between squatting for a couple of years while ignoring court orders seems better than torching the place. Maybe I'm not chaotic enough!
I agree, but sometimes reason vanishes when people are under great stress. The first neighborhoods put to fire in Detroit were the same low income, majority black ones the arsenists lived in. It made no sense to attack the homes of their neighbors but they did it anyways. The anger was as intense as the flames, no one was spared.
I feel like burning down a place… they’d have insurance to cover rebuild and lost rental income. It would be the renters who would suffer meanwhile.
So like, when is it socially acceptable to grab the proverbial pitchforks?
I think it already is. I think we just need to send a Calendly to see when everyone’s got some free time and we can burn this mother down.
You need the rednecks to rise up first. Until they realize they've been duped by their (Republican) politicians,they will lick the boots of their oppressors. Once they wise up, you'll have an armed population that isn't going to 'back the blue' anymore
As a red neck from Florida, you underestimate how far boot lickers will take things. I sometimes legitimately fear an American Reich starting in the south. My neighbors have some seriously fucked opinions.
At least five years ago. Probably more like 18 or 20.
I don't really understand what the end goal here is. They've got to realize that at some point people are going to just take what they need right? Are they hoping that's far enough away that it won't be their problem anymore? Or do rich people schools not teach what happens when workers are backed into too deep of a corner?
The mindset these people have is the same one that is destroying the ecosystem: they do not care.
The long term is seen as merely a succession of short terms. Numbers going up is seen as proof of prosperity regardless of if those numbers signify actual sustainable growth or not.
How often do Americans pay rent? When they say rent was $750 do they mean weekly or fortnightly?
If it's not specified, monthly. Otherwise it's specified.
The only fortnights that exist in America is the video game. It's not a division of time used here.
Monthly.
Usually monthly when unspecified. However, I would do a ton of stuff to get my rent to $750, that's literally 1/3 of what it is now (also just got notice it will increase come renewal of course)
I'm a landlord, have been for over a decade. I keep my rent as low as possible and during peak covid gave my tenants many months free, etc. I barely make a profit on the place, just enough to convert expenses mostly and some to buffer for the future.
Everyone around my property is raising rent like crazy. I'm almost half the market rental rate right now, and my tenants are (obviously) hesitant to leave because it's cost them at least twice as much to move anywhere else.
Point being, shit is crazy right now, even for those of us trying to do the right thing. I don't know wtf is going to happen next, but this isn't sustainable.
Thank you for your honestly and for being a good person. You've really shown that this whole problem is a choice made by people trying to exploit a needed resource. This is basically the housing version of buying all the toiler paper at Costco.
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convert office buildings into apartments. it’s a start.
Except for the part where you have to rip out everything and build it virtually from scratch due to the severe lack of plumbing infrastructure to individual spaces in the same way that apartments require.
It sounds great, but realistically it's almost easier to just demo the buildings and begin from the foundation.
Either way the issue isn't the ability to construct apartments and/or condos, it's the land being owned by people who either want it for a commercial use-case or it's just being held for value increase.
I am fine with demoing the buidlings and creating new apartments / condos if that’s what it takes. It just seems like this wouldn’t be true for all buildings, but maybe most. You’re right that the owners of these properties are placing a huge bet on their buildings being used for commercial use again. The city should tax vacant buildings higher to discourage squatting on these properties by commercial investors.
Land.
Value.
Tax.
Unless that’s what I just described (a land value tax), I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
It's exactly what you described.
Essentially people will hold onto property in order to make more money on it through land value inflation.
If we tax the crap out of property that isn't being used, then either the tenant will do something with it or sell it to someone who will, instead of just waiting for the market to double their money while they play golf.
Seems sensible to me.
It seemed sensible when the economist Henry George postulated it as the solution for wealth inequality and the seeming rise of material desire that the uber-rich cause in the market. Unfortunately no one listened and the landlords won, and now we're here.
landlords with corporate money and lobbyists, I imagine. hopefully some change can happen on a city level.
But, hear me out; Poop buckets.
Let’s start hunting landlords, and when they’re gone we move on to the CEOs
There needs to be a massive protest, by staying in where you live. To have shelter and four walls, should be and is a humanitarian right. We've gone throughout all of history starting with having no walls but caves, then to having huts, then to having pantheons, to finally having modern day walls and to having everything sustaining us within those walls.
And the only people that charged us, were when we visited Inns and Hotels, sometimes other people when we holed up in a room by their option. Not a lot of these greedy landlords existed then, but here they are now, upholding and upsetting the very things we've struggled to achieve.
Yet we're going to allow that?
It's fine, the billionaires can still have several homes, and a custom yacht. That's all that matters right?
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