I’m going to write another comment, because I’m skeptical that you will actually read my original reply.

I think you should self reflect a bit. Your position here was to call me a ‘selfish, horrible person’ because I have found value in being able to rent a house. All the While you are a landlord yourself, deflecting your responsibility and putting me down, someone, who, for all you knew, was a renter them self (the very class whose necks you step on with your property owning foot).

Now, I’m only using language like that because you you have thrown the stone. But I encourage you to reflect.

Do you think that the entire 70 grand is going towards that? Do you consider the occupation of the property to be valued at 0?

Taking your scenario, do the math

What is the cost for your to buy or mortgage the property and the difference of the rent.

That’s where the value difference is. The maintenance is different than the cost to live there. I’m not arguing on fair pricing. But the maintenance side is not the entirety of your rent payment. Its also not the only value.

So you should look at it more like - what’s the value proposition of being able to leave whenever I want, maintenance, etc, vs owning the property.

Either way you are spending a large sum of cash, it’s not a scenario where if you had bought instead of renting you get all 70 grand back.

I think it’s also disingenuous to exclude scenarios that occur outside of your renting scenario. Critical maintenance like utilities, HVAC, and structure usually aren’t done while a tenant is living in the unit (unless there is a specific issue) but the cost is still there. As well vacancy, which is a premium a renter pays for high availability of properties. You can argue that certain costs should or shouldn’t be swallowed, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are there. A prime benefit to renting is that you can leave whenever, that isn’t a physical value, but it exists (you can even break your lease or rent month to month in many cases) try leaving when you are upside down in your house by 100 grand and you got laid off from work. You are absolutely stuck. Maybe you short sell and completely tank your credit, maybe you just eat the cost and ruin your life savings, but unless you can sell your property (which has tons of costs associated with it) then you are SOL.

Slum lords exist yes, but that’s not an intrinsic property of the value proposition at play.

It’s not 70k for the person to change a lightbulb, it’s x dollars to occupy the space, and y dollars to remove your responsibility. The $1500 you are paying is some combination of that. Similar to insurance, you pay a premium to remove a liability, the same applies to renting. I’m not arguing that pricing is fair and just. Just that, the idea of short term rentals have value.

Firstly you don’t know who I am, or my situation.

I know from actual experience (as I have been all three, renter, homeowner, and property manager/landlord) I still prefer renting in many cases. there is a lot of value in renting, including, the ability to be transient, and the lack of attention or care that one needs to keep

I think you are assuming that a landlord just calling a guy is the same as you just calling a guy, and sometimes it is, but when I rent, the value is that I don’t need to care, at all, I just send a text message to the same guy I always send a message to and they come in fix it while I’m at work, and it’s done. I don’t need to make insurance claims, I don’t need to sus out 15 different contractors to get the best price, I don’t need to do the actual work myself, etc

Come back after you’ve owned that duplex for a decade (you evil selfish horrible property owner, as you describe them) and you need to replace the roof and the HVAC system and you will see that it isn’t always the same scenario. Yea fun little house projects are great, and you get to hang pictures on the wall or whatever, but that isn’t valuable to everyone.

Do you really think homelessness issues would be solved by getting rid of the ability to rent property? Have you ever actually worked with homeless people before? In many cases, homeless people don’t want or need to own a house, they want the ability to be transient, to move to where work is, to incrementally improve. A physical house is a burden, it requires maintenance and attention that someone getting on their feet doesn’t necessarily have the time or energy for. Short term living is essential for equitability. Forcing everyone into ownership schemes means forcing people into rigid structures that don’t allow growth. I’ve moved from state to state to state, if I had to buy and sell houses Everytime I moved somewhere I would have lost more money than renting, thanks to economic crashes, closing costs, interest, etc.

I think the problem you have, seems to be extortion in a housing market, driven by large commercial interests, which is pretty different conceptually from the idea of short term leasing of a managed property as a whole. Missing the point and focusing on level of effort instead of looking at the abstract value proposition. I don’t care how much effort something is for someone else if I’m paying them to do the thing, it’s because I find value in it. The same way that doing an oil change is super easy for a mechanic, but I don’t want to do it so I pay someone else. Or making. Sandwich, or whatever.

Unfair prices are not intrinsic to the concept. And I would wager your rage should likely be directed towards unchecked capitalism.

I don’t see an effective system that has private ownership of property and no short term living schemes. I can only see that working with full state intervention, supplying housing for people as they need, which is such a fundamental shift in economic strategy that it isn’t worth discussing. Unless your argument is for communism, in which case, sure, but any landlord discussion is basically useless as the core structure of ownership changes and responsibility changes.

But I dunno, you also seem to be a hypocritical property owner yourself, so i don’t really get your position overall.

In fact I’d say you are the worst kind of property owner. You are using someone else to cover your mortgage, someone you know personally, and so instead of just co-owning the property, you rent to them? Why do you get the equity gains? Why are they paying your mortgage interest, helping your credit, etc.

You have the same energy as ‘the only moral abortion, is my abortion’. Do you think you get a pass on subletting property because you feel you have a morally superior position? Do you think you are not still extracting value? If they are not owners of the property, then they are paying you for the privilege of living in your property, regardless of promises you may make to them or even if you pay them back, you were able to extract time value of money out of them. You are the person you are accusing me of being. But if you think they are getting value from the scenario, than I really have to question your stance as a whole, how do you reconcile this?

Why don’t you sell the other half of the property to the people you think should rightfully own it or refi and add them to the mortgage? If you have an excuse, then maybe you should self reflect on your stance, since there are obviously scenarios, where there is some value in being a landlord.

Look, I get the sentiment.

But conceptually, landlords do present a service.

There is time value in being able to call a singular person and say ‘my stove is broken’ and not have to do anything else.

Yes you can do it yourself if you have the time and skill, it is a hassle finding the right stove, at the right price, getting it delivered or picking it up, finding, hiring, and going under contract with individual people to do installation, managing warranties, etc.

A lot of people don’t want to do that, a lot of people are also comfortable paying a premium to have someone do stuff that they don’t want to do.

There is value in being a broker, and that is a landlords primary job, the maintenance and responsibilities are abstracted away to the renter.

That’s what, five people?

It’s a lot different when it’s thousands and thousands

I actually don’t think this is the case, since it’s just emulating actual behavior. In this case, real humans are talking like that, so if the AI adopts that in its training data, it’s not nonsensical.

It’s not really different from new slang getting passed in as training data and the AI using it.

The thought termination at the end, ugh…

It’s not about a banner, the subject is a person and there is a predicate to a direct object. The post is about people who do something, not about the thing they do.

I think most people would just use Windows without activating it

Take it a step further and declaratively configure your entire installation with nixos

If trump managed to build effective high speed rail that goes coast to coast, hits more than just NYC and LA, and is affordable, I think history would probably end up forgiving him for a lot of shit.

Never gonna happen though.

American style subdivisions are the absolute worst for kids, nothing to do at all.

Walk around the same 5 streets with 150 houses around, get kicked out of all of the common areas by Karens and HOAs.

Kids don’t go outside there either because there is not much of a point, if you’re lucky there may be a tennis court that you can hang out at.

Good luck going to see your friends from school though, even though they live in the neighborhood across the street, the street in question is a 5 lane highway with no pedestrian bridge or tunnels.

Wanna go somewhere with other kids your age, better hope you can have someone drive you.

A base model steam deck is $50 cheaper than this, a base model Xbox series s is $150 dollars cheaper, and it’s the same price as a PS5 slim.

Yea, I mean, why not.

what is your argument, if game prices haven’t increased over time (as your claim alludes) and yet, in spite of that, the games industry has ballooned, creating the largest media industry in the world, I don’t see why prices need to go up.

Video games make money hand over fist, they do it at any price point (vampire survivors sold at least 6 million copies at a dollar, balatro sold at least 3.5 million copies at $15, these games made millions of dollars) what evidence do you have that shows that higher prices are needed to keep the industry afloat?

Maybe the unsustainability lies in the large studios trying to capitalize on brand recognition and loyalty, continuously growing their own costs and spending money on things that don’t actually make fun engaging games. Obviously the video game industry would continue to survive and thrive if Nintendo disappeared off of the face of the earth tomorrow, so it’s not a video game industry issue.

Objectively false.

52 cards make more combinations than there are atoms in the universe, you can have data centers filled with random numbers generators and they wouldn’t draw the same card twice.

That example uses one dimension, just that single set. with music you have multiple dimensions, even if you get extremely specific, and say that you have 10 chords along 12 root notes (this basically forces you into western music, no diminished chords, just the triads and the sevenths) you have 300 million unique sets of 4 ordered chords (a typical chord progression, that’s effectively an entire lifetime of 4 minute songs non stop before you get to something that has been done before.

If you add in time signatures, swing, length, silence, noise, volume, tempo, arrangement, etc, you end up with effectively infinite combinations.

But that doesn’t matter anything, because you seem to be assuming that because a component may exist in some form already it means nothing new can be derived from it.

Music speaks to its time and its culture, it tells stories and reflects the emotions of the world it is created in. That world constantly changes. Sampling a sound from an old song can create something new, the story told by the old sound can be different. A derivative work does not a copy cat make and it actually believes it or not is possible to make new music even if the same chord progression exists.

And that doesn’t even begin to include the variation in production style, effects, or the biological differences in people’s vocal chords.

What makes you think that you are so special that your little 80 year lifetime landed right in the middle of the death of music. And what makes you think new things can’t be done, it’s only been 50ish years since we’ve even had a grasp on stuff like synthesizers.

Economy of scale, the market has grown with the scope of games and also, most games do not require a team of hundreds of people to develop.

I covered it in another comment, but game development is easier now than ever, many of gamings greatest hits in the modern era are made by teams of less than 10 full time workers or even completely solo.

The Atari developers didn’t have unity and Internet forums, they didn’t have managed programming languages, they didn’t have asset libraries, they didn’t have modern art toolchains and 3d modeling software with high level easy to use features.

Additionally, looking back at old games is looking with biased eyes. The tech was just as cutting edge as it is today, and the learning curve was steeper, it was harder to just get a computer, let alone, learn how to program one. The talent pool was smaller and it was harder to get funding for a game, the higher prices reflected that you were paying for niche software. That isn’t the case anymore.

And the argument doesn’t even make sense. Should a Blu-ray copy of avengers cost $500 because it cost hundreds of millions to make?

And things are supposed to get cheaper as technology and processes are improved (and N64 games were large complex cartridges that were expensive to produce).

Yes the quality of games has improved overall, but the market has also grown, meaning things like economy of scale and commodification typically come into play. Additionally the tooling for making games has been dramatically improved, digital art tools are better, game engines are pre packaged with a bow on top and development is (or can be) done in high level memory managed programming languages like c#. It’s easier than ever to make good games right now, every aspect of the process has increased with the scope of the games themselves.

Music has absolutely not stagnated and the only people who say that are people who have a passing interest (or none at all) and no desire to seek out anything beyond a Spotify playlist of tiktok trends.

And just because [insert your favorite genre] isn’t topping charts right now, doesn’t mean that a) it’s gone away, and b) that the music that is popular is bad. And also, just because some of the music that gets popular is less dynamic or complex than others doesn’t mean it has nothing to say or has no value.

Honestly, the ‘modern music bad’ take is just so braindead and it makes me so sad thinking about the people who refuse to allow new music in their life just so they can hold up holier than thou beliefs about the music they grew up with.

It’s pretty common for wealthy people to trade in their car every year or two, keeping in mind that a cyber truck is 80k+ the demographic is people who can afford to always have a new car.

Having to make a ton of insurance claims is not a good thing.

Eventually you become uninsurable, which is a lot harder to overcome than a sales slump.

Not really.

I’m a big signal proponent, but it’s very barebones. There is a half ass story implementation, but otherwise, it’s a pretty lean messaging application with voice and video and that’s pretty much it.

Signal doesn’t really have a mechanism for following accounts the way you can on telegram and WhatsApp, and while it supports group chats, it’s more akin to an old school group text rather than a channel like on telegram or Whatsapp.