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The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.

It's appalling to think of just how much of our hard work and economic output is being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive while receiving all the rent money that so many of us have to pay as tribute, just to avoid being homeless.

All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage. Makes me wonder, what's the point?




The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.

The root cause is life and economic reality. Working for free is antithetical to survival and simply cannot be sustained over the long run.

Makes me wonder, what's the point?

I think the universe is instructing you to to become a landlord. Once this has been achieved, then you can spend all your time developing free software.


That mortgage is paying off the people that built the house. What remains after that is to pay for the landlord's food and medicals. Take the landlord and the house away and where do you live now?


> All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage.

If you think that it is so easy and risk-free, why not take your own mortgage and let other suckers pay it off for YOU?


I think the most charitable way to respond is to empathize with the person who has spent >=$X monthly for the last N years and did not had contribute that amount to a mortgage instead as an available option. It's easy to respond to your opponent by assuming that all the unbound variables are on your side. What if they aren't?


Don't get me wrong - I can empathise with how hard it can be to get your own house or flat these days.

But I do not think OP's comment was fair to the landlords. It is not their fault that building materials are getting ridiculously expensive, that more and more people need to live in/near the cities to get a decent job and other factors that make owning your property less and less accessible.


The comment was about paying rent, not landlords.

<https://xyproblem.info/>


Not OP, but some possible explanations:

- it's against OP's values and principles - OP doesn't believe it's risk-free or easy (I don't believe they said that) - OP doesn't act solely based on financial incentives


He did not say it explicitly, but I think that it is implied in this part of his comment:

> being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive

I would argue, that doing something that is not easy and taking risks is the opposite of lazily sitting around and doing nothing productive.


The only real risk is temporary expense and inconvenience if a tenant turns out to be bad.

Even if it's not possible to eliminate that risk, there are various not particularly challenging ways to minimise it.

On a return-for-hours-worked-actively metric, being a landlord can be extremely easy.

And you can trade off money for more time by handing over more or less all of it to agencies and/or informal support.


> The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.

And having to eat. It's equally appaling.


The point is that you can live at a place you can't afford to buy. If not rent, then a mortgage is waiting for you, but at the same time your responsibilities increase quite a bit.

So what do you suggest? Free housing by the government? I'd love that too, but can I get a penthouse pretty please?


This is not a credible line of argument.

Other countries - notably Finland and Austria, among others - have no problem providing reasonable state housing at reasonable cost.

Finland houses its homeless as a matter of course because it turns out to be hugely cheaper than the alternatives, economically and politically.

Some of those countries also score well on affordable private home ownership.

America doesn't - because the idea of a government that buffers its citizens from private sector exploitation is against the guiding creed of economic narcissism.


Comparing developed nations to America is kinda unfair, but ok :) My point was that just because somebody is a landlord it's not the root of all evil. (I'm not one).

Governments can and do create programs to support families (too bad for singles in my country) but at the end getting all this for free is probably a utopia.

Affordable home ownership exists everywhere, but nobody wants to move to most of those places, people need more than a roof above their heads, but that comes at a cost.


So you want stuff for free? You think buildings spring out from the ground by themselves?


No but the state can be much more effective at providing housing then individuals.


State sucks at doing anything because of sheer and rampant incompetence


Well said. But let us go deeper:

“Property must be destroyed before imagination can be developed any further.” (Berger)

“No matter how much it proclaims its pseudotolerance, the capitalist system in all its forms (family, school, factories, army, codes, discourse…) continues to subjugate all desires, sexuality, and affects to the dictatorship of its totalitarian organization, founded on exploitation, property, male power, profit, productivity… Tirelessly it continues its dirty work of castrating, suppressing, torturing, and dividing up our bodies in order to inscribe its laws on our flesh, in order to rivet to our subconscious its mechanisms for reproducing this system of enslavement. With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its programs… Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments.” (Guattari)


The capitalist system is bad --- except for all the other systems which are arguably even worse.

The fact that you own a computer capable of making your post is a testament to the evil effectiveness of capitalism.


The nerds who actually made technology possible did not care a bit about money. Now, capital did make mass technology possible. But it cannot have pure innovation, only financial and operations engineering.


The nerds who actually made technology possible did not care a bit about money.

Easily proven false.

I know a lot of nerds/geeks who make technology possible --- I'm one of them. And virtually all of them have a job of some sort working for money.


n=1


Just live in a van down by the river. That will show that landlord a thing or two!


No one is forcing you to rent in a specific place. Go buy a flat or house yourself.


[flagged]


Maybe then I should be paying rent to the construction workers who built the apartment I live in and the laborers who made the raw materials, as a thank you for all their hard work.


They got their salary for their time. Is that unfair anyhow?




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