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Discussion Socialism Discussion Thread

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Jarate said:
The SJW socialists keep an echo chamber where they firmly believe that Dunkaroos arent the best childhood nostalgia snack and will ban anyone who says that Fruit by the Foot isnt the best
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have you been spying on the staff discord server? how did you know about that policy? it was supposed to be secret!
 
Branduil said:
If there's one thing socialists are famous for, it's never having different perspectives or arguments
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... and now I'm cleaning off my computer and changing my shirt after this post made me do a spit-take. Well played, and well put.
 
under communism everyone would get the same amount of the orange gushers instead of the pack being almost all red
 
BlueSpirit20 said:
Do you not think that actually it would be more interesting to allow other perspectives to be heard, rather than having the forum be nothing but an echo-chamber?
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Sure! But you should make sure that sharing your perspective doesn't involve shitting all over the floor and demanding it be given value :)
 
20230222_163004.jpg


Hey, folks

Is there anything I should know before tackling this book?

Thanks in advance!

(Also, maybe some note-taking methods and pointers you all can point me toward; thanks!)
 
I can't say I expected this thread to be so lively.
 
Actually, are there any good ways to take notes and quotes of a book you're reading?

Like, my way of taking notes and quoting passages is honestly pretty clunky so far.
 
merp said:
Actually, are there any good ways to take notes and quotes of a book you're reading?

Like, my way of taking notes and quoting passages is honestly pretty clunky so far.
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For me I read a chapter then type a synopsis of it. But everyone is different.
 
merp said:
I'm trying to take quotes, but using my phone to take pictures every time and then highlighting the picture just feels awkward.
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Some book reading apps allow for adding notes attached to quotations, but usually only if the book is in EPUB format. That’s how I manage.
 
For repeatedly using classist arguments, you are receiving a permanent threadban. - VolcanicDynamo, Red Monster, xghost777
TanookiTom said:
Now we are obviously not going back to being hunter gatherers, but a start could be that having a roof over your head should be a human right and everybody should be entitled to that. Now if two people want to live in the exact same place, that is not physically going to be possible, but it doesn't have to come down to price. Hell you could make a lottery out of it, that could even lead to more mixed neighborhoods and less segretation.
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I agree that shelter is a human right. But suppose two individuals are competing for a rental unit in an urban area with a predictably heated housing market. Would you really flip a coin as to who gets it rather than allocate it by price? Is being priced out and having to move to a less contested town not acceptable? It sounds inconvenient or even devastating but hardly a violation of human rights, even if you have to leave your friends and family. But then, having to leave friends and family can and will happen, if you live in a rural area and you seek to study. We already accept it as a tolerable inconvenience. Living in a city is not a human right, is it? Sorry for not specifying this earlier, but usually rental markets are heated in cities, and less so in rural areas.

TanookiTom said:
A left-leaning politician here suggested that nobody should own more than the own apartment/house they live in themselves. Radical idea obviously but I like it. It's perverse what some landlords / investors (especially those owning hundreds and thousands of units) do with their power and how they are hurting society as a whole.
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How do landlords hurt the society? Suppose we handed the all housing over to the government. Next what? The state will likely not know the equilibrium price of a unit (a landlord does - it's the maximum amount the highest bidder is willing to pay for this particular unit). So if a state underprices a unit, you have 300 people standing in line. How is that an improvement? Do you roll a dice as to who gets it? Suppose I worked hard all my life - do you think I should not have access to this rental unit moreso than someone who's been slacking off all their live? Again under the assumption that living in a city is a luxury.

Why not just build social housing sufficient for the amount of required low skilled workers, and build as much as possible in general to apply downward pressure on the market? I don't find your approach particularly actionable or effective. If there is a huge demand and low supply of housing in a city, remove the hurdles for real estate companies to build. Clearly, they want to build because there's unmet demand and therefore unrealized profits.
 
toxic user said:
I agree that shelter is a human right. But...

snip
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Yeah, anything with a "but" here regarding anything dealing with some sort of human right is an immediate disregard.

How do landlords hurt the society?
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You're literally called Toxic User and you're trying to argue how Land Lords don't harm people. Land Lords SHOULDN'T EXIST. Period. They're scummy. Crappy people. And even the "good ones" (aka, the ones who are often the least crappiest and do try to do what they need to), take advantage of people at the end of the day. You're not welcome here.

EDIT:

Oh, I see now.

You posted this earlier in the thread.

toxic user said:
If two people want to move to the same place, how do you solve it if not by price?
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Yeah, you're absolutely a bootlicker when it comes to this sort of thing. Like, a person's shelter or income should not be at the mercy of someone taking advantage of them and should not be subjected to more rooms/people's having to deal with higher prices. A lot of us are disabled, poor/low income, and it absolutely disgusting at the corporations and land lords buying up properties and charging unliveable places for so many. Even arguably the system we have in place, many times, governments work with land lords and corporations to provide "affordable" living, and I'll be blunt: for a low income/disabled person, that "Affodrable" living absolutely ain't affordable.

Landlords and Corporations are leaches and need to be cut out of the entire picture. And the government could at any point step in and fix this, but choose not to, and it's infuriating. If anything, they'd rather work with land lords and corporations to "provide" homes, while land lord pocket shit, while charging tenants unreasonable rent even on low income/disability.
 
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toxic user said:
I agree that shelter is a human right. But suppose two individuals are competing for a rental unit in an urban area with a predictably heated housing market. Would you really flip a coin as to who gets it rather than allocate it by price? Is being priced out and having to move to a less contested town not acceptable? It sounds inconvenient or even devastating but hardly a violation of human rights, even if you have to leave your friends and family. But then, having to leave friends and family can and will happen, if you live in a rural area and you seek to study. We already accept it as a tolerable inconvenience. Living in a city is not a human right, is it? Sorry for not specifying this earlier, but usually rental markets are heated in cities, and less so in rural areas.


How do landlords hurt the society? Suppose we handed the all housing over to the government. Next what? The state will likely not know the equilibrium price of a unit (a landlord does - it's the maximum amount the highest bidder is willing to pay for this particular unit). So if a state underprices a unit, you have 300 people standing in line. How is that an improvement? Do you roll a dice as to who gets it? Suppose I worked hard all my life - do you think I should not have access to this rental unit moreso than someone who's been slacking off all their live? Again under the assumption that living in a city is a luxury.

Why not just build social housing sufficient for the amount of required low skilled workers, and build as much as possible in general to apply downward pressure on the market? I don't find your approach particularly actionable or effective. If there is a huge demand and low supply of housing in a city, remove the hurdles for real estate companies to build. Clearly, they want to build because there's unmet demand and therefore unrealized profits.
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Honestly, you’re in a socialism thread, claiming that any market based on capitalism will automatically solve the housing problem being discussed, in opposition to all available evidence that such market forces are easily exploited by the wealthy, the powerful and the corrupt and so it both doesn’t solve the problem and is extremely unfair. I don’t think you’re really gonna get anywhere in this thread when your stance is so diametrically opposed to the thrust of the thread.
 
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Something I wanna address in one more post because I re-read it and I really need to talk about this.

toxic user said:
Suppose I worked hard all my life - do you think I should not have access to this rental unit moreso than someone who's been slacking off all their live? Again under the assumption that living in a city is a luxury.
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This, is the definition of classism, because it says that someone who doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't deserve as equally as someone else. And get off on saying people are "slacking off all their lives."

What do you consider me? Someone who can really work because of my disabilities, have to collect disability, get just barely over $10,000 a year.

Am I "slacking" off?

Like, screw off.
 
toxic user said:
I agree that shelter is a human right. But suppose two individuals are competing for a rental unit in an urban area with a predictably heated housing market. Would you really flip a coin as to who gets it rather than allocate it by price? Is being priced out and having to move to a less contested town not acceptable? It sounds inconvenient or even devastating but hardly a violation of human rights, even if you have to leave your friends and family. But then, having to leave friends and family can and will happen, if you live in a rural area and you seek to study. We already accept it as a tolerable inconvenience. Living in a city is not a human right, is it? Sorry for not specifying this earlier, but usually rental markets are heated in cities, and less so in rural areas.


How do landlords hurt the society? Suppose we handed the all housing over to the government. Next what? The state will likely not know the equilibrium price of a unit (a landlord does - it's the maximum amount the highest bidder is willing to pay for this particular unit). So if a state underprices a unit, you have 300 people standing in line. How is that an improvement? Do you roll a dice as to who gets it? Suppose I worked hard all my life - do you think I should not have access to this rental unit moreso than someone who's been slacking off all their live? Again under the assumption that living in a city is a luxury.

Why not just build social housing sufficient for the amount of required low skilled workers, and build as much as possible in general to apply downward pressure on the market? I don't find your approach particularly actionable or effective. If there is a huge demand and low supply of housing in a city, remove the hurdles for real estate companies to build. Clearly, they want to build because there's unmet demand and therefore unrealized profits.
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Dawg just said that he deserves better than poor people because poor people are just too lazy

I can't
 
toxic user said:
How do landlords hurt the society?
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The godfather of capitalism, Adam Smith, can explain

The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions; for it can scarce ever be more than partly the case. The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expence of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent, as if they had been all made by his own.
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The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.
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“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them.
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Tl;dr They're parasites who maximize what they can extract while providing absolutely nothing
 
Not saying it's what's happening here, but is there anything more annoying than the landlord who complains about people being mean to landlords? Like you make tons of money by doing nothing, why draw attention to yourself by complaining so much.
 
The fact we've had landlords come in here and people who bootlick capitalism, when this is a socialism thread, is just something. Though I do think toxic user has been the most brazen literally saying poor people deserve less out of the others...
 
PixelKnight said:
Honestly, you’re in a socialism thread, claiming that any market based on capitalism will automatically solve the housing problem being discussed, in opposition to all available evidence that such market forces are easily exploited by the wealthy, the powerful and the corrupt and so it both doesn’t solve the problem and is extremely unfair. I don’t think you’re really gonna get anywhere in this thread when your stance is so diametrically opposed to the thrust of the thread.
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I am saying that market based solutions are probably better than the alternatives. I think focusing on big corps/landlords is a completely wrong way to approach this issue as you're just missing the real problem of urban housing: it's a supply shortage and little else. Instead you're focusing on the symptom (increasing prices by landlords). Urbanization is progressing faster than construction can keep up with and that is the case practically everywhere in the world. Any shortage in market economies will drive prices up. If you have X people applying for a rental unit, you will have to make some determination as to who gets the flat. Your point is that making that decision based on return on investment is unethical (or I presume that's what you believe), I'm saying it's ethical because living in a city is not a necessity, even if it is (evidently) very desirable. Subsidies for refugees, low income workers and students notwithstanding, I support those. But clearly, all the non-social housing won't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be allocated randomly or by whatever else metric you're proposing. At the end of the day you must provide as much housing as possible to meet the demand and any policy that disincentivizes private investment and construction will harm the very group you seek to provide shelter for. If I cap the rent, investors will build somewhere else. We already know this. Just forget about landlords and think about how to maximize the amount of units built. Free markets aren't failing to provide sufficient urban housing because they're free markets - clearly, the market wants to provide as much as possible as there's unmet demand and therefore unrealized gains to be had. The question you should be asking is: where are those shortages and what do we do about them? Is it construction capacities? Bureaucracy? Zoning laws? Something else altogether? The idea that an entirely government run housing market could magically solve all the housing issues when a free market with a profit incentive can't, is quite honestly wishful thinking.

I grew up in the aftermath of a centrally run economy and I think short of dropping a nuke on my city, you couldn't have left it in a worse state. It took decades to recover. That said, a housing shortage was truthfully not among the issues we faced for a long time. It would be hard to believe anybody would want to move here given the state the city was in after the iron curtain fell.
 
toxic user said:
I am saying that market based solutions are probably better than the alternatives. I think focusing on big corps/landlords is a completely wrong way to approach this issue as you're just missing the real problem of urban housing: it's a supply shortage and little else. Instead you're focusing on the symptom (increasing prices by landlords). Urbanization is progressing faster than construction can keep up with and that is the case practically everywhere in the world. Any shortage in market economies will drive prices up. If you have X people applying for a rental unit, you will have to make some determination as to who gets the flat. Your point is that making that decision based on return on investment is unethical (or I presume that's what you believe), I'm saying it's ethical because living in a city is not a necessity, even if it is (evidently) very desirable. Subsidies for refugees, low income workers and students notwithstanding, I support those. But clearly, all the non-social housing won't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be allocated randomly or by whatever else metric you're proposing. At the end of the day you must provide as much housing as possible to meet the demand and any policy that disincentivizes private investment and construction will harm the very group you seek to provide shelter for. If I cap the rent, investors will build somewhere else. We already know this. Just forget about landlords and think about how to maximize the amount of units built. Free markets aren't failing to provide sufficient urban housing because they're free markets - clearly, the market wants to provide as much as possible as there's unmet demand and therefore unrealized gains to be had. The question you should be asking is: where are those shortages and what do we do about them? Is it construction capacities? Bureaucracy? Zoning laws? Something else altogether? The idea that an entirely government run housing market could magically solve all the housing issues when a free market with a profit incentive can't, is quite honestly wishful thinking.

I grew up in the aftermath of a centrally run economy and I think short of dropping a nuke on my city, you couldn't have left it in a worse state. It took decades to recover. That said, a housing shortage was truthfully not among the issues we faced for a long time. It would be hard to believe anybody would want to move here given the state the city was in after the iron curtain fell.
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Supply shortage, of course:
unitedwaynca.org

Vacant Homes vs. Homelessness In the U.S. - United Way NCA

Many overpriced homes sit vacant while populations experiencing homelessness continue to grow in the U.S. See which cities have the highest disparity here.
unitedwaynca.org unitedwaynca.org
  • Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.
 
Mendinso said:
Yeah, anything with a "but" here regarding anything dealing with some sort of human right is an immediate disregard.
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That's probably the most incredible dishonestly cut-off quote I've ever seen in my life, it's almost comical. Shelter is a human right, living in a city isn't. Clearly, this is true and I'm absolutely confident you agree with it. And if you don't, I'm pretty sure I can convince you that people in rural areas (or less competitive towns) aren't having their human rights violated. Obviously, living in a city is very desirable for economic and cultural reasons and if you grew up there, being priced out can have devastating effects on your quality of life. I don't dispute any of this. It's just that none of this rises to the level of a human rights violation or even close.


Mendinso said:
You're literally called Toxic User and you're trying to argue how Land Lords don't harm people. Land Lords SHOULDN'T EXIST. Period. They're scummy. Crappy people. And even the "good ones" (aka, the ones who are often the least crappiest and do try to do what they need to), take advantage of people at the end of the day. You're not welcome here.
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How should housing and rents prices be determined in your opinion? Landlords have the function to determine the price of a unit. In the economic sense they make the market efficient by finding the equlibrium price (where supply meets demand).


Mendinso said:
Yeah, you're absolutely a bootlicker when it comes to this sort of thing. Like, a person's shelter or income should not be at the mercy of someone taking advantage of them and should not be subjected to more rooms/people's having to deal with higher prices. A lot of us are disabled, poor/low income, and it absolutely disgusting at the corporations and land lords buying up properties and charging unliveable places for so many. Even arguably the system we have in place, many times, governments work with land lords and corporations to provide "affordable" living, and I'll be blunt: for a low income/disabled person, that "Affodrable" living absolutely ain't affordable.
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I do believe there should be social housing for those who need it. I was referring to non-subsidized units.
 
Like holy shit, we're still feeling the aftermath of the worst economic shitfest because we needed that 'the markets' made the line go up.
 
Oheao said:
Supply shortage, of course:
unitedwaynca.org

Vacant Homes vs. Homelessness In the U.S. - United Way NCA

Many overpriced homes sit vacant while populations experiencing homelessness continue to grow in the U.S. See which cities have the highest disparity here.
unitedwaynca.org unitedwaynca.org
  • Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.
Click to expand...
It is a supply issue of supply in areas people want to live in. You all can already live in bumfuck nowhere if you want, but clearly that isn't very desirable. Plot vacancy rates and rent prices instead.
 
toxic user said:
It is a supply issue of supply in areas people want to live in. You all can already live in bumfuck nowhere if you want, but clearly that isn't very desirable. Plot vacancy rates and rent prices instead.
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Considering you said this:

I grew up in the aftermath of a centrally run economy and I think short of dropping a nuke on my city, you couldn't have left it in a worse state. It took decades to recover. That said, a housing shortage was truthfully not among the issues we faced for a long time. It would be hard to believe anybody would want to move here given the state the city was in after the iron curtain fell.

Where are you even talking about?
 
Oheao said:
Considering you said this:

I grew up in the aftermath of a centrally run economy and I think short of dropping a nuke on my city, you couldn't have left it in a worse state. It took decades to recover. That said, a housing shortage was truthfully not among the issues we faced for a long time. It would be hard to believe anybody would want to move here given the state the city was in after the iron curtain fell.

Where are you even talking about?
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It is perfectly consistent. Prices are driven by demand and supply. My country was centrally planned and run to the ground because of that, however a housing crisis wasn't one of the issues - because living in a socialist state doesn't exactly drive demand. If your solution is to centrally run a state such that everyone wants to flee it rather than move in, then I will concede that's a very effective way to curb demand, just not a desirable solution from my point of view. Provide supply and avoid policies that disincentivize construction.
 
The funniest shit on their deranged argument is that they're describing a white supremacist wet dream, where the poors get to be shoved elsewhere and they get to enjoy their elite cities and services.
 
toxic user said:
It is perfectly consistent. Prices are driven by demand and supply. My country was centrally planned and run to the ground because of that, however a housing crisis wasn't one of the issues - because living in a socialist state doesn't exactly drive demand. If your solution is to centrally run a state such that everyone wants to flee it rather than move in, then I will concede that's a very effective way to curb demand, just not a desirable solution from my point of view. Provide supply and avoid policies that disincentivize construction.
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Oh, countries like Russia who had massive standard of living drops after switching to a market economy in the 90s?
 
NarohDethan said:
The funniest shit on their deranged argument is that they're describing a white supremacist wet dream, where the poors get to be shoved elsewhere and they get to enjoy their elite cities and services.
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This is unhinged framing. It assumes that I do not support policies to provide equal opportunity for everyone. Why would you even assume that?

By the way, you guys are dogpiling me with economic takes more heterodox than flat earth theories (which I don't mind btw, I enjoy arguing no matter how fringe your positions), yet not a single one of you has addressed my posts point by point, which is something I do mind. All my thoughts are perfectly consistent and transparent, open for everyone to dissect. A full page later and I still don't have the slightest idea how all of you would come up with a system that would provide housing more efficiently than the current one. Not saying the current system is flawless, but you need to demonstrate how other systems would improve on it.
 
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