betelgeuse [comrade/them]

The motivations of wealthy libertarians are material, they don’t want to give up their wealth or ability to control resources. However, poorer libertarians don’t have that problem. They don’t have any wealth to give up. Therefore the ideology has to be tied to immaterial things like abstractions. It becomes about liberty, individualism, divine right, etc for them. The wealthy mystify their own relationship with labor and capital because it gives the workers a reason to join them rather than achieve class consciousness.

Dallas Fort Worth has a history of gas explosions after heavy rainfall due to the clay soil absorbing the water, expanding, then contracting, causing explosions.

???

It sucks that they killed Deus Ex and split up the shop for Guardians of the Galaxy. Now Dishonored is dead and the shop will be split up so they can do more Marvel slop.

Huffing my steam deck fumes, getting the munchies and eating the single hot chip and washing it down with the panera lemonade.

Wonderful has $3.6 billion dollars worth of agricultural land in California. They also own a lot of water rights in the state. The water restrictions you hear about? Guess why it’s hard to get water to all the houses that have popped up over the last couple of decades.

They did this with Iran and pistachios too. The Wonderful company lobbied to stop imports of Iranian pistachios because they were competition.

He thought we could overcome problems by using capitalism. He was a true believer, not just a wealthy cynic. We would be the commies by introducing them to Coke-a-cola and blue jeans. We would solve imperialism by liberalizing previously occupied and having them join the world economy. He still wasn’t okay with having an alternative to capitalism. In a way he was a further abstraction of problems, not a counter to them. If he had continued we would continue to see imperialism, just by more abstract means. And eventually we’d still learn that you can’t have both, that the exploitation will be enforced by violence regardless of how it’s sold to the West.

When the materialism kicks in

US collapse is going to be slow. We’re going to dwindle into corrupt fiefdoms led by various wealthy families and individuals. These people will be in various overt states of war and treaty, just like olden times. As it becomes more obvious we are nothing like the liberal ideal of America, they will further entrench themselves in patriotic and nationalist decoherence. Some will perform a ritual where they dress up as the Founders and pretend to be them, warping history around their present. Some will turn to Lincoln, JFK, Obama as the focus of their nationalist emanation. These strange outbursts of black comedy will be punctuated by bouts of violence. Domestic terrorist attacks, organized crime.

We’ll slowly become a reflection of our projections against the global south. A third-world country with world-leading poverty and a corrupt government funded by foreign capitalists trying to keep The American Project going long enough to finally defeat communism.

Just spelling it all out. Wage slavery is just an abstraction of slavery that actually benefits the burgeoise.

I’m sure Diebold and/or other companies that specialize in election hardware/security will be glad to land those contracts.

A lot of the things they say make me go “wait fucking wat”, and on some level that’s a good thing

Did you know that the US once tried to import hippos as a source of meat, as an alternative to cows?

I was looking at the numbers up until about May/June of this year. What drove housing prices down before doesn’t seem to be driving them down now. You plentiful construction, relative to now. Construction workers haven’t recovered from 2008. There is still a running shortage of construction workers.

There is also a COVID backlog of started but not finished homes. Because supply chains were backed up. The cost of soft lumber, sheet goods, and milling are all near all-time highs. Once these homes start hitting the market, supply will go up and maybe prices will go down a little bit, but not 10-years-ago-low

If commercial real estate crashes then some of those investors might have to unload their residential assets to offset losses. That’s about the only scenario I can see where we get a sudden flood of supply.

Defaults on residential is still pretty low. Credit defaults are climbing but not outside of 1 std deviation, yet. Lease defaults are low. So with restricted supply, few being built, fewer workers, more expensive materials, and everyone paying their loans, I can’t see a sudden crash anytime soon. Also it doesn’t look like mortgage fraud (people lying about their identity or their worth) is particularly high either. Though that stat is much harder to track.

IMO housing prices will go up before the end of the year.

I think housing costs will stay high and the next “innovation” will be disposable housing or something vile. That’ll be the only way you can afford to own something. You buy a house you throw away in 10 years.

I don’t know why other people are giving you a hard time. I’m about as far left as you can go as well. This is absolutely a far-left song. This is the kind of thing Mao would have played when liquidating landlords or Stalin would have used as a soundtrack to confiscating Kulak farms.

This is probably the anthem of the far left and I’m glad you, as a fellow far leftist, enjoy it.

Private insurance

If your goal was to house people then you could just charge the amount of property tax since your mortgage is $0. So, oof, yeah I do totally got you. Your investment is paid off, since the house is paid off. The only thing left is just wanting people to pay you for nothing.

Embrace what you are. Stop trying to abstract it behind being a saint or appeals to the market.

If you provided them at a reasonable price you wouldn’t make any money. Kinda telling on yourself there. The only way your business works is if you charge more than your mortgage. The bank is charging you for borrowing money so even they’re marking it up. The reasonable price would be the price without the bank’s markup and yours.

But hey you’re the Donald Trump of lemm.ee, so don’t let anyone ever tell you how da business goes. You grab your copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad and you solve the housing crisis by doing credit checks and marking up rents.

Wait, just so we’re clear on the timeline of human development. There were tribes and no society. Then there was the industrial revolution, English Common law, and then now?

You really, really, need to study history. You’re missing a few thousand years there. That’s probably why you’re confused. You really do think humans were savage tribes before 1492.

Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest… wait a minute… they won’t do it unless someone pays them??? Really?

Humans are a productive species and have produced many things necessary for survival long before capitalism or English property rights ever existed. You’re doing that thing again where you don’t know anything about history but you feel very strongly about defining the boundaries of human nature to be 17th century commerce. People don’t need money to produce things.

People also have shared responsibilities and duties. Nobody learns every single aspect of everything else. Some people are farmers, some are not. Some people build houses, some don’t.

Also paying for things is not unique to capitalism. Commerce has existed long before capitalism. It’s not like before 1800 everyone just traded chickens for everything.

You do, in fact, think people are slaves. You think they should work for a fraction of the value they create and then come home to pay you 2x the amount in rent. That way you get to pay off your mortgage and then keep collecting rent once your original investment is paid off. I guess that part is different from providing a necessary service, right? You just want to provide homes and get a huge return on investment. How pure are your motives?

I’m sure you’re clever enough to buy a farm and rent the fields to the workers and then rent them housing too. They give you a portion of their grain, it’s a fair trade after all, you own the farm. They should pay you for the privilege of working to keep you fed and housed. You should just chill and collect a check and bushel of grain every fall because you worked really hard to own that property. Totally not slavery.

Why does it matter if I personally hammered the nail or paid someone else for the house that he hammered the nail into?

Because that’s the definition of building it yourself.

helping myself does not harm anyone else.

Stating a thing does not make it so. Just stating you’re doing no harm doesn’t make it true. I can explain why you’re doing harm but you can’t explain why you’re not. Explanatory might makes right. We’re talking about the science of society, not vibes.

How do you even begin to think something is owned by the workers when they are not the ones paying for any of it.

Value comes from labor. A forest is nothing without the lumberjacks. A pile a logs is nothing without the workers of the saw mill. A pile of lumber is nothing without framers. A frame is nothing without drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians. The ownership you claim is just a piece of paper given by the state based on historical premises of property rights. It’s not a default state of nature nor a universal truth.

Wages are specifically designed to not pay them the full value of their labor. If you own a horseshoe factory that produces each horseshoe for $1, then you can’t pay a person $100 an hour to make 100 horseshoes in that hour. You wouldn’t make any money as the factory owner. So you must pay them less than the value they’re producing. It’s how businesses work. Likewise you can’t rent a house for profit without charging more than its worth. You can’t afford to build all those investment properties unless you pay the people who actually built them a fraction of what the house is worth. You exploited the people who built the house so you can sit on your ass and exploit workers who need a place to live. It’s quite simple.

Oh that’s funny because somehow I did manage to do just that… and I didn’t come from money or any special background. I applied for the scholarships, the loans, put in the work, forgo eating out for decades, looked for opportunities, leveraged my meager earnings into extra payments until I finally paid off my first house. Made sure I didn’t make a baby or get into massive credit card debt etc. I went and lived in the low cost areas no one cares to go to. I made the required sacrifices to eventually get to a better position.

There’s two ways to build wealth under capitalism. One is to get a bunch of people to work for you and pay them less than their labor is actually worth. The other is to leverage your capital, buy property and then become a rent-seeker and/or lender. That’s what you did. You were fortunate enough to be able to get loans and leverage your debt and get scholarships. Most people don’t get all that. The people you rent to don’t get that.

I said a bunch of arguments against yours. You can’t demand an argument from everyone and then when someone gives you wave it off as mere rhetoric. Yes it’s rhetoric. That’s what the word means. I think you’re just saying stuff based on vibes. You don’t actually know what words mean or have any real sense of your own position. You just know that you feel a certain way and want that to be as valid as my rational argument. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

It’s also funny how you think not eating fast food and living in a place nobody wants to go is some grand sacrifice and the reason for what you have. Dude millions of people live without McDonald’s or a suburban home in the nice part of town. They also don’t get loans and scholarships. Their prostrations before capital go unnoticed.

Rather than demanding we disprove your views maybe you should spend some time thinking about why you believe them beyond “I’m a hard worker.” Like do you really think you’re the only person who has ever worked hard? Do you think that the reason why most people don’t have rental properties is because they’re not hard working? Imagine the hubris to think something like that.