Renting doesn’t just mean that you can’t afford to buy. It’s got other advantages, like not having to deal with repairs, upkeep, being able to move pretty much on a whim… Guess that’s worth it to some ppl
This is how I met my wife 10 years ago. It was -20 Celsius outside and I was in shorts waiting for a bus. She came over to ask why I was wearing shorts, which sparked conversations and now we’ve been married for over 5 years.
My legs generally don’t get cold. Even in that -20 C weather my legs just don’t seem to be bothered. I have no idea why, other than I’m acclimatized to cold weather or something, though it’s possible there’s some nerve issue in my legs that makes me not feel the cold - again, no idea.
Other parts of my body get cold, like you won’t catch my shirtless or shoeless in that weather.
On the other hand, if I wear pants, my legs will sweat profusely and get itchy, which is way more uncomfortable to me. I’m also generally a very warm person, and usually sleep at night without a blanket covering me (otherwise I’ll sweat all night and be uncomfortable). If I turn the thermostat down then blankets become tolerable, but then everyone else in my house will complain it’s too cold.
I’m also aware of the dangers of frostbite, so if I expect to be in -20 C weather for extended periods of time (like an hour or two) then I’ll put on pants. If it drops to -30 C then I always put on pants no matter how long I plan to be outside.
Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion, though I expect it also raises new ones.
Being mad at an independent landlord is like being mad at the dog shit you just stepped on instead of the motherfucker that didn’t pickup after his dog.
Many independent landlords are people who decided to take her everything they had on a derelict home that nobody was going to buy, fix it up, and make it available. These are people that dream to get out from under the boot and are willing to bet it all for a chance. A landlord with one or two rentals are probably struggling to keep their head above water and almost for sure have a full time job as well as the maintenance of the rental, and probably the fixing up of another.
This is how the system is rigged. If you want to mortgage a house, you need to have a lot of money down, steady income, and a good credit score. Mortgaging a fully remodeled house in order to rent it doesn’t work because you’ll never be able to rent it for that much. Mortgaging an ugly house to rent doesn’t work most of the time because you need to remodel it “nice” and you need to find a tenant willing to pay a premium for a pig wearing lipstick. Most times, even when the house is done up, the neighborhood isn’t. Next up, if you want to mortgage a derelict house that you plan to bring back from the dead, wether to rent or live in, YOU CAN’T. The only way to buy those homes is cash. In other words, neither homebuyers nor wannabe landlords have access to the only homes that might provide a good value. Wanna guess who can? Investment funds. They are the ones raping renters, not the poor schmuck that’s trying to play the game the way they were told it was supposed to work. That schmuck is fucked, they just don’t know it.
My wife and I owe the current life we lead in great part to a lady that decided to rent her duplex to two college students for $275 twenty years ago. She died and her daughter sold all the houses the lady owned (she owned the entire street in that ghetto) to a fund. Each duplex (meaning, half a house) now goes for $1200 (still a ghetto) and now requires a credit check and two months deposit.
Get mad at the rigged system, not at the other suckers stuck in it. Don’t be a crab in the bucket.
EDIT: There are good independent landlords and there are bad ones. There is no such thing as a good real estate investment funds.
My landlord is a farmer. He’s out on the fields everyday. Comes to fix our boiler with his hands covered in fresh chicken shit. The rent is expensive, but it could be much worse considering.
My landlord was a single mother and she provided for me for years before becoming my landlord. She had me paying rent since I was 7 and that’s when I learned to appreciate landlords.
Bought a nearly 100 year old house earlier this year, 1.5 hours away from where I live. I work full time.
I’ve spent nearly every weekend and ALL of my free cash (plus credit that I’ll likely be paying off for a few years) to replace the sewer lines, insulate the crawlspace and basement, replace the roof, replace the siding, replace the leaking windows, update the electrical, update the plumbing, replace old appliances, replace corroded cabinet hardware, seal holes around the house from rodents, paint the walls, ceiling, and cabinetry inside the house, remove and clean up a dilapidated wood shed, empty an incredible amount of rotten and corroded junk from the basement, CLEAN the basement, replace the broken door to the basement, fill in and repair cracked and broken concrete, replace the rotten hot tub, and ongoing efforts to prevent water from flooding the basement every time it rains.
And I’m not finished. Not even close. There is so much to be done to make this place work and make sure it stays in good condition for years to come.
The initial priority was pest control, deep cleaning, painting, and furnishing. Once that was done the place was listed on AirBnB. It’s helped to offset the costs, but will take decades to break even. After utilities, taxes, supplies, and expenses for cleaning between guests I’m pulling in maybe a couple hundred dollars a month. But it helps.
AirBnB is also a big part of the problem. If you want to rent your fully furnished apartment for $1300 (net to you), by the time AirBnB is done with fees to you and the tenant, the tenant is being charged $2200. It’s obscene. AirBnB and VRBO were originally meant to help homeowners offset there cost of their homes by renting a room or the entire place while they were away. Now they are these monstrosities that do nothing but syphon money from homeowners and tenants.
I’m glad you’re fixing up the place and keeping it off the hands of investment funds. Once it’s fixed up, if possible, I’d recommend renting it directly to a tenant for a bit under market rate. Management companies tend to price gouge tenants (and owners), and they con you into raising rent every year. They don’t care if the tenant can’t afford it or if the place stays empty for months. If you can find a tenant that is decent and treats your property well, stick with them, even if you make less than maximum on a monthly basis by charging less than market. Pass the savings of not having a middle man to your tenant and everyone (except the middle man) wins.
We are actually fixing it up for family to live in. We have overseas relatives who visit for 6 months a year. When they are not here, we might use it for ourselves as well - but more likely we will rent to traveling nurses.
I’m not interested in being a long term landlord. I’ve lived with enough self-entitled roommates to want to never have to be on the other side of that relationship as a landlord.
Guessing so they can continue the work in between guests. Probably not in a state to lease out as then they are under a lot more obligations to quickly fix bigger issues
Imagine the contractor that works for a REIT. Should they get full rent because they broke their the same way as you? Or hourly, just like my roommate?
You get the rent because you’re a landlord, not because you work hard.
If working hard on a property, instead of owning it, meant getting all of the high rents then the REITs’ contractor should be collecting rents instead of the REITs but that obviously doesn’t happen.
Don’t defend landlording. Oppose it, you can still be one, but just oppose it.
Would you make the same if you sank all of your money in investments and work a second job as a contractor? Same story but different results?
If you had long term tenants and but they owned the property but contracted you? You would still work hard and be compensated for the work isn’t that enough? If the work the justification for your rental income then why not just be a contractor instead of an owner? And better yet leave the owning part to the people who live there.
So instead of buying a home that needed a lot of work and spending a lot of money locally in order to accomplish that work and making minimal (if any) profit, I should just give my money to an investment firm who will be both shittier AND more expensive to renters, while siphoning money away from that local market?
Please explain how me investing in a REIT rather than actual real estate solves your problem.
You do as you’re told. You study hard, you go into student debt, you get a job, you make your debt payments, you live frugally and somehow end up with a few bucks extra in your bank account every month. After a few years you’ve got yourself some money set aside. What do you do with that money in order to get out from under the boot off the system? Here are your options.
Invest in the stock market. You know, the rigged casino that cheats you if there’s any chance for you to make a profit. It’s all a game of musical chairs and someone is gonna left holding the bag. Will it be you?
Buy a fixer-upper, work hard, make enough on rent to basically cover the mortgage, taxes, and maybe most of the maintenance, all in the hope that you can sell it at a profit before prices crash. It’s all a game of musical chairs and someone is gonna left holding the bag. Will it be you?
Crypto! It’s all a game of musical chairs and someone is gonna left holding the bag. Will it be you?
Literally buy lottery tickets.
Stick your money in an interest bearing account and watch it lose value daily because nothing ever keeps up with inflation.
At least when you buy and fix a wreck there is some sense of agency. It feels like you can do something about it. We are told to do our part, be responsible, play our part and we will be rewarded, but it’s a lie. It’s been a lie since Reagan was elected and it got way worse under every administration since. They love it when we get at each other’s throat like this because it’s what stops us from setting fire to the whole thing.
PS: Person buys home to rent with the dream of actually owning something tangible. Person nets 2% if they’re lucky but they are happy because at least they aren’t losing. Everyone on the Internet hates them. If the same person buys shares in a real estate fund that’s literally making people homeless, buying trailer parks and evicting everyone, etc., they will make as much as 20% return yet nobody here bats an eye. That’s the poison right there. That’s the disconnect and how they keep us down. Why own anything and be a decent human being when I can log into this app, give it my money and not have to worry about who my money hurts?
Love how you’re getting downvoted for making clear and logical arguments. Notice how no one has, or will have, a rebuttal?
It ain’t the landlords kids, it’s the real estate empires fucking you over. The answer is federal legislation saying any single entity can only own, I dunno, 10 or 100 houses? Devil and details and all, but these megacorps should not be able to own 10,000 homes. And of course, we need exceptions for lenders like banks that have an inventory of foreclosed properties that don’t magically get insta purchased and fall off the books.
Who am I kidding. There’s too much money to ever turn that boat around.
You’re solution doesn’t solve the thing you’re trying to solve.
E.g.
There is a “mom & pop” landlord with just 10 properties. But they don’t purchase anymore. Now there are 1000 such landlords. The landlords all incorporate and create a REIT that owns 10,000 homes. You have created a “megacorp” through just “mom and pop” landlords.
What is the difference?
The true answer is the abolition of landlords in favour of housing coops and community land trusts.
To prove a point to you I’ll ask you a question.
What is the difference between the goal of small landlords vs REITs and “megacorps” represented by row 4 of the graph found here?:
I don’t have a problem with the players necessarily, just the game.
I’m lazy so I invest because I don’t want to deal with being a landlord. Anyone who chooses to be a landlord deserves no sympathy. They chose to be a landlord instead of investing. You can get easy R.E. exposure by just being R.E.I.T.s so any extra work is your problem. On top of that landlords expect extra respect for something that REITs do. It’s all the same game so all should be looked down upon.
Wanting to play as a boot when the game rewards playing the boot is ok so long as you advocate against the boot. But a lot of these people glorify the boot and try to become one sooo bad and for that, all of them can have the death penalty on them.
In short, want real estate? REITs, do you want to become a boot? Invest. But most importantly of all, be a boot abolitionist. If you’re a boot defender then you rightfully get criticism.
I think your saying doing something physical is better than through an app. It makes no difference. It’s all the same. But I do agree more awareness needs to be had with REITs. The solution is not to go easy on landlords but rather to go hard on REITs.
A bit off topic from your point, but there is no way to get screwed if you just invest for 10+ years in all market index funds from something like vanguard. The only way you’re going down in that situation is if the whole system goes down for good. Also government bonds go well above inflation. There are options for regular people, but both of those options likely mean financially supporting things you might not believe in. Like a imperial government and a dirty energy focused economy. The only way it’s a casino is if you buy individual stocks. Index funds are the safest way for regular people to make more money than inflation, you just have to be willing to let your money sit for a long time. You don’t invest in index funds if you’re unwilling to wait for the boom and bust cycles to pass a few times.
It’s not hard, it’s just expensive and intense at times. But it’s lucrative and pays off after years of upkeep and maintenance that the renters NEVER do. I ain’t selling the house. Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
But why would the tenant maintain the property? I mean, I’m a tenant and will carry out low level repairs if I cause any damage, or if entropy means that something looks shabby. But beyond that? It’s not my fucking house. My landlord just put my rent up by £50 a month to cover “the rising cost of maintenance”. They’ve not done a single bit of maintenance in the year I’ve lived here.
I can hate both the players and the game, because it’s rigged.
Right. I’m paying you for the home I’m living in. It’s a service you’re providing me as a tenant. I don’t own the house, if I did I would pay someone to fix my shit.
OK, what’s your plan for housing then? Run right out and purchase your own home? Got the cash and credit for that I assume?
Oh, and if your HVAC dies, the only phone call you’re making is to the local contractor. Hopefully it’s a $20 capacitor and not a $5,000 new unit. Hope you’ve got a lot of DIY experience or a load of cash!
If the renter doesn’t pay for maintainance who does? Are you willing to run a monthly loss of $100/month or would raise rents to cover or even sell the property?
The solution is cooperative housing and community land trusts plus social housing.
How about not hording property? Did she have a house? Did she need to own a entire ghetto? I have no pity or empathy to people who own multiple houses and rent them.
She and her husband literally restored an entire street that had been derelict since the Louisiana oil crash by using her husband’s pension and disability after having destroyed his body working on the rigs. Literally abandoned homes that they fixed, made livable and rented, without credit check or any other bullshit, for affordable prices. Our street was the only safe street in the entire neighborhood, and also the only one where the homes were in good condition. Nobody wanted this homes. Nobody had the means or desire to fix them. Stop trying to manufacturer villains around the narrative you’re being fed. People can’t afford homes because of funds and companies specifically designed to hoard shit. That’s why prices are skyrocketing.
Agreed. The average landlord is playing the long game for themselves but isn’t much of a target and can’t do much about the market as a whole, it’s usually about a lack of collective pushback across the board that allows things like rents or food prices to spike or shift above CPI and inflation ranges, I won’t pretend to know what I’m talking about because there’s obviously a lot of factors involved that myself and many others all have yet to figure out, but I don’t think landlords are the only people we should be mad at, that’s just biting your friend or caretaker rather than looking for a systemic answer that provides collective benefit
I mentioned it before. There was a major economic collapse. Louisiana had an oil boom followed be a collapse. Families bought homes they could comfortably afford, then one day they had no job and no prospect for a job. Nobody did. Entire communities moved out or collapsed.
I knew this guy years ago that bought up basically free property during the housing crisis. Houses were so undesirable in Detroit at the peak of the housing crisis, you could buy a house for $100, as they were considered a liability. His goal was to fix them up himself and then provide them to the community as extremely low rent residences, if anyone wanted to buy them after they were fixed up he would give priority to his renters at slightly above cost (cost of materials) as a rent to own system (not one of the scummy ones but a real system in their favor). He had no intention of making money, he just believed it was the right thing to do. Dude was just a good person through and through.
In high school a friend of a very attractive popular girl asked me if I liked popular girl. I thought she was playing some kind of prank on me so I said no. It was not a prank. She really did like me. To this day I wish I would have said yes.
One time a girl in my computer class kept asking me for help. She’d ask me to stand behind her and point to where she should click. She asked if the view was nice, which was weird since it’s just a computer screen. Eventually, she decided I should move her hand while it was still on the mouse. That happened a lot and I always thought “wow this girl really doesn’t get computers.”
I was in my late 20s before I realized she wanted me to look down her top and touch her hand. She must have been thinking “wow this guy really doesn’t get women”
There are many things further down the road to go wrong with attractive popular girls. 2 most catastrophic cases in my life are with those such as them.
Admittedly I’m the one who mainly failed them due to misunderstandings and passiveness, but when a girl (being all that popular) is used to boys being rather active and competitive and social, and then you are here just cause she happened to like your looks, this may end painfully, for you more than for her.
There are also cases from the post, only I may have noticed, just wouldn’t risk losing an existing good friendship for possible romance.
Wow, do so many people believe Lemmy user are that much different than Reddit user? I mean I can totally forego all the bots, incels and astroturfing, but I do believe they migrate automatically once a platform got big enough. I don’t think there’s any way to stop that unless you want to keep Lemmy small forever.
Lemmy needs to grow because Reddit needs to go. Reddit has become too powerful for a greedy company like that.
I would be very interested to see the percentage of lemmy users that were reddit users right up until the point they switched primary platforms. I have to imagine that number is near 99%.
I’d like to echo this point. As soon as you set your objective to pull in Reddit users, you’ve set yourself up as the “Reddit alternative”, you’ll be chasing Reddit features and attempting to please the Reddit users. To succeed at this game is to essentially end up creating Reddit, but never surpassing.
In my opinion, Lemmy needs to have a clear mindset on what Lemmy is and what it isn’t, then stick to that.
It would be a real luxury to have that clear mindset, but I don’t think that’s possible.
Lemmy is something like a teenager. It needs time for its own identity and culture to coalesce. For now I think the best we can do is to avoid the notion that we’re alt-reddit.
Wow, do so many people believe Lemmy user are that much different than Reddit user?
Some are, but some are even worse than reddit, for example the cursed reddit custom of profile downvote… actually never happened to me on reddit but here it’s constant.
Reddit made it so you can’t downvote from a profile page, it simply wouldn’t count. You had to open every comment individually and vote on them. Sorry that it is happening to you. Maybe make a new account, karma isn’t that important, yet we all feel more welcome if there’s positive votes.
Nah i don’t give a shit about karma i’m just genuinly depressed people are this angry and petty. But then again it’s not really surprising since it’s mostly coming from the US bootlickers.
It also skews the point of downvotes even as disagree button.
Reddit made it so you can’t downvote from a profile page, it simply wouldn’t count.
I didn’t know that lol, support my theory of some places (.world for example) being really worse than reddit.
If it’s in a list with other films with years first, you wouldn’t be about to visually scan by letter, though. Two “Saw” films could be separated by hundreds of others in between.
With the right roftware its reasonably easy to read and rewrite metadata/format a new file name in large batches but it’s not something I’d expect the average person to touch.
Yeah, my solution would also be awkward dealing with most movies that are one off stories and there are some weird technicalities where deciding if a movie is from one franchise or somehow a crossover series from a different studio etc. Where it would need some arbitrary decision making.
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
I guess, technically yes. Does that mean I have to specify that I am in no way endorsed by or representing Pepperidge Farms and that I cannot attest the quality of their products because they are not offered in my country (or at least I haven’t seen them)? Is that The Way It’s Meant To Be Played?
Bruh, your not gonna believe this, but the ducks at the park are free. if you use one of these, you can download all the ducks you want. I downloaded 9000 ducks so far.
awfully lot of people make the mistake of conflating palestinians with hamas, especially considering that the last elections were out there almost 20 years ago and weren’t allowed since. west bank effectively treats gaza as under rebel government
(same goes for conflating israelis with israeli govt of course. they have mostly-functional elections, but bibi tries hard to undo it with his judiciary fuckery. this might be one reason for intelligence lapse - some army people resigned as a result of these moves and in parallel some seats were stuffed with bibi’s people)
then you have this bit where likud needs hamas because this riles up israeli nationalists, which harass and contain gaza and send out settlers which radicalizes palestinian right wingers, which
goes without saying that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with hamas existing but i’d also say that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with likud in power
This is the right take. Likud and Hamas (and the other minor parties/terror groups aligned with those two) deserve each other. The civilians don’t deserve to be caught between them. They’re both fairly popular afaik, but I can’t necessarily blame the people when either side unilaterally disarming would face atrocities.
you gotta be arguing with somebody else, because i didn’t say any of that
in a hypothetical world where you can mount meaningful opposition to hamas while living in gaza for long enough for it to matter, then yeah
but i don’t deal with counterfactuals and while this would be morally correct, heroic etc i don’t expect any of this
what i have said is that if you want to have lasting peace, you need to have both likud and hamas out of the picture. note: i’m not saying who should do it, or how, or when, or if it even will happen at all. that’s because there’s plenty of people whose plans and incentives don’t include lasting peace and actively work against it, for example likud and hamas. and i’m not predicting anything, i’m just saying that shit’s fucked and whatever happens now, it won’t be pretty
Thanks to industrial grade food production meat cows and dairy cows are two entirely separate breeds by now. Old school cows you were able to butcher once they died of old age or whatever and get a decent cut of meta out of that. Modern cows are bred to either produce more milk or to produce more meat. Which on one end results in cows too thin to be butcherable and on the other end results in cows with too little nutrients in their body to produce any excess milk.
I say we go back to the old ways of mixed use cows and live with the reduced milk and meat output. What most people drink might as well be colored water given all the fat gets filtered out of the milk so switching to an alternative shouldn’t be a problem (aside from getting used to not drinking cow milk and instead whatever milk is to their liking)
The only issue you’re missing is this. If 5 dairy plus 5 meat cows yield 20% more total food now than 10 cows yielded then, focusing on the perceived waste of not eating a milk cow is fallacy. Is there a substantive argument that we are using cows less efficiently than we did a century ago?
What most people drink might as well be colored water given all the fat gets filtered out of the milk
Per the Mayo Clinic, it’s tough to beat dairy milk for balanced nutrition. That is even (or especially) with the excess fat removed and reserved for other products. Switching to an alternative is generally a nutrition problem. Only fortified and unsweetened soymilk comes close.
And one could argue it is the least palatable alternative. Calls to mind “instead of a doughnut, eat an apple”-style dietary replacement advice. Except in this case, there’s no huge nutritional gain like those stupid “instead ofs” have.
When I was in the Navy, during the mid 90’s, I watched these things take off and do training tests or whatever they did. We watched them for hours. It occurred to me, watching them in perfect daylight and with a understanding of what I was watching, that if I didn’t know what that was it could have easily been a UFO. And ever since then when someone tells me that they might have seen a UFO I tell them about watching that airplane and how UFO it looked taking off and doing maneuvers. Its shape and speed make it such a bizarre thing to see.
I saw some jet in 2010 at an airshow in Spangdahlem, pretty sure it was an F-22, transition from flying normally to what can only be described as standing on it’s engines and flying through the air, horizontally, belly first. Evidently this was easy enough to be performed directly over the base at a very low altitude. Mindblowing.
This is generally what I say about news reporting on any technical topic. Just look at any report on a subject you understand, realise how much they get wrong. Now, assume the same level of accuracy on a subject you don't understand.
This sort of thing is why I’m so excited for AI journalism, yes it costs jobs but the quality improvement will be drastic as they won’t get burnt out, can “understand” every topic, and can even produce in multiple languages accurately. We won’t have to worry about this anymore as people won’t have to click on one of say 100 articles written to get people to read when they can choose 1 that is actually interesting of 1000.
It absolutely will be used to do that, but people can choose where they get their news, so if you put out such a news source people will go to you instead of those sites. This is the good part capitalism.
It’s cheaper and easier to produce more high quality articles if you don’t have to worry about journalists getting burnt out or overworked. This also opens the door for writing the same article in many different languages with analogies and the like tailored for different cultures based on language or even location, as well as even writing it in real time with the specific person in mind so it can be more interesting to them. On top of this it means that you can get stories quicker than everyone else with the same quality as AI is much faster than a human.
Not just news reporting, but the propagation of information in general, so add in social media and word of mouth in there too. Assume everything you hear or read is wrong, because the majority of info is created from the first peak of a Duning-Kruger chart.
I’d say journalism is always like this when it is profit motivated. There are a couple of factors at play. First, you need to publish your article as fast as possible so no one beats you to the scoop and take views away from your piece. Next, you are incentivized to oversimplify everything to ensure your article appeals to as broad an audience as possible. Finally, you are incentivized to write sensationalist titles to attract attention.
The outcome of this gets gnarly fast. People’s first impressions usually color how they forever view the story. For a long time people still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even after it was clear that was false. Part of this is psychological, but part of it is that reading the corrections section of the news is boring as hell. I think some of THAT is just human nature of we’re fascinated by the novel, and correcting details isn’t novel. But also some is that publishers don’t want you paying close attention to their fuckups so they bury them. They think it would reduce your trust in them
Next, oversimplifying tends to result in inaccuracies. Its a game of telephone. An expert explains their very best understanding of what’s going on to the journalist, simplifying it because the journalist isn’t an expert and needs to ask questions to grasp the parts that don’t immediately make sense. Depending on the field, even the expert might not have fully solidified their understanding yet. Anyway. The journalist simplifies their understanding of the subject for mass consumption. Generally speaking, the audience can’t ask the journalist follow up questions like how the journalist did with the expert, so we’ve just crossed a territory into which resolving misconceptions is going to be much harder going forward. After that, let’s be real, you’re probably going to summarize stories you heard to your friends creating further layers of simplification.
Finally, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve all read an article title, not read the article, and still retained whatever misleading sensationalist title the author wrote.
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