I said something about landlords being inherently parasitic to my aunt thinking shed be a receptive audience because of being poor and having left-wing politics and a history of activism but she objected that there are good landlords

shes awesome though

Inherently is a very strong word

@georgia the eternal struggle between "this position in society is Bad" and "but some individuals in that position are Good"

@sun youre right but I think its a great majority. such a stark position of power over someone as being able to directly render them homeless often results in abuse of this power. with other services provided if you do a bad job they can go elsewhere, its much more difficult with a shitty landlord.

@georgia I think it’s complicated by, yes if you view it systemically why people don’t have access to a home. But in a simple sense many people don’t do valuable enough work to afford a full house. I realize that is controversial to say but just because a human did the work doesn’t mean the value exchange will always work out to affording a good life.

@sun housing is extremely hard for most people to afford these days not because they aren't performing worthy work, but because wages havent increased with the housing market. wages havent increased imo mostly because shareholder value go up is seen as the supreme good. for instances my aunt I mentioned performs valuable work, shes a good teacher in underperforming communities, but shell likely never be able to afford a house.

@georgia of course I mean like

If you are 60 and you still work at Burger King what the fuck did you expect

@sun thats fair but not being able to afford a house is mostly a thing among younger generations

@georgia I was taking issue with “inherently” in the 1960s people could afford houses much more but there was still renting

@sun @georgia

If you see an elderly person working any job, you shouldn't be asking yourself what they "did" to deserve that life. You should be outraged at a government that views it's citizens as disposable meat bags.

As a knowledge worker you need to see the writing on the wall, you're much closer to becoming one of the masses of poor working class Americans than you think.

@subnetter @georgia I grew up from that class and I don’t consider it as morally inferior but it is not valuable work and that person could definitely have moved on to something better, and you know it

@subnetter @georgia fast food work specifically I mean.

@sun @georgia you're not accounting for several variables and factors, you are making hypothetical assumptions about why someone does the job they have.

And I would not say the work fast food workers do isn't valuable. That AI drive thru shit ain't all that.

@subnetter @sun @georgia without fast food workers, people who can't cook and lazy people would have to go to a convenience store or a grocery store for prepared seedoil slop to kill themselves with. They provide a very valuable service.

@sun @georgia @subnetter idk. that pathway used to provide a living wage and a stable if small life. I've met many retired and semiretired service workers who bought a house and had a small family off that wage in very upmarket areas.

@sun @georgia @subnetter not today ofc, but nothing can provide that sort of stable and small life today. I blame regulatory and market issues making housing an investment rather than a consumable good, and old people occupying existing housing stock (including the unfair 55+ covenants) in this class.

@subnetter @georgia @sun I'm in the fast food trenches atm, and I have ranked up to a point where I could live on my own but, if you do it long term, you pretty much have to become the boss or move on.
Most of the people I work with are not cut out to be the boss, either from lack of desire or ability. Specifically, the older to elderly ones are usually very nice but just not super competent for one reason or another, and you can tell they're basically stuck where they are. It's a lot of factors, but anyone who is 40+ doing this shit at the bottom is either starting their life over from a messy divorce e.g. or they're fucking doomed to never escape this*.
Idk what it would take to make their lives better, tbh (besides more money but good luck making that happen), but the reality on the ground is pretty grim.

*And by this I mean living paycheck to paycheck renting, never making enough to save, unreliable transport, can't keep their light bill paid, etc etc. It's a lot of them.

@kernow @georgia @subnetter I ran some numbers for it and even at the absolute peak of relative buying power of minimum wage (1968) it didn't reach national median home prices. in effect if you bought a house on only minimum wage income, it was only possible in certain areas and a particularly cheap house. This is of course improved situationally if you are a dual-income minimum wage earner household. this was also again at the absolute peak, if you go start going earlier, it becomes unaffordable again.

I am not denying your experience though you can find lots of people that did it but it was never true generally on a national scale it seems.

@pwm @georgia @subnetter yeah and I am not even implying these people are just "dumb" or something, I have met a ton of people in my life that I KNOW are not "dumb" but they absolutely are not even trying to meet their obvious (even if "modest") potential. It's disheartening.

@pwm @georgia @sun yeah I know, that's why a lot of people in these industries will be real with youngins about not making a career out of it.

I also grew up under this instability my whole life, which heavily influenced my career choices.

@sun @pwm @subnetter most people consider me pretty smart but i have no ambition and no executive functioning skills to achieve such an ambition were i to have it

@georgia
Some Land Lords save up money through hard work to buy a house

Other Land Lords get money created out of nothing lended to them from a bank to buy a house that they never worked for then charge people rent for that house that they never worked to build nor saved up money by working to buy

Now in some cases a land Lord borrows money from a bank to hire a construction company that hires employees to do the work to build the house

The construction worker & tenants did all the real work

@georgia @sun being a landlord really sucks though. it's kind of stupid thing to do if you value your sanity at all-- the incentives for tenant and landlord are so at odds with each other that it encourages a kind of acrimonious relationship, and the tenant has a lot less to lose if the landlord ends up on their bad side.

you're lending out an extremely expensive asset that represents a fair amount of your life's work to someone else who has no investment in it and no real permanent reason to care about it. tenants also have a ton of legal protections and they often can only be held liable for a security deposit if they damage the property.

I'm sure it sucks being a renter and having them raise your rates or force you to move so they can sell the property etc. I've heard horror stories and I'm glad I've never rented-- I've only ever lived with my parents, on the streets, or owned my house.

I have experienced that world... Not good...

@bajax @georgia @sun just bring back beatings for misbehavior

@bajax @georgia I helped landlords do property work a few times and straight up a lot of people are just scum and they destroy shit and don't care. not sorry for observing this

@bajax @georgia separate issue from if landlords are scum, obviously many (probably almost all) are

@sun @georgia I mean, if you're gonna rent out a house in the first place, things are so fucked up right now that it usually means something's wrong with you.

so glad I never had a landlord though.

@sun@shitposter.world @bajax@baj.ax @georgia@netzsphaere.xyz It's one of those unfortunate situation where both sides have levers against each other- and often you're an sucker if you don't pull yours.

@georgia @pwm @subnetter @sun my mom constantly complains I'm not ambitious, classmates at uni say I should be making money already with what I can do 😔

@georgia I don't have as many problems with landlords who actually rent their property out but of course some are better or worse than others. The problem are investors who don't do anything with their property and treat it as an investment, leaving us with less places people can actually live in.

@sun @georgia @subnetter as a caveat all these people got down payments as wedding presents