I’m saying for 10 years people have been trying to play this stupid “what are you” game with me, and for 10 years I’ve been frustrating them because I know what they’re trying to do better than they do.
As I have mentioned before, this stupid “what are you” game doesn’t have anything to do with the alleged content. It has nothing to do with what I support, or with what you support, or the man in the moon. It’s just a simple vacuous content free word game.
It’s like this…
Why did the dog cross the street… to get a bone.
Why did the dog cross the stream… to get a bone.
Why did the dog fly to mars… to get a bone.
Above, none of those statements are about streets, or streams, or flying to mars. Those words are just placeholders. By analogy, nothing about the stupid “what are you” game is about what you support, or what I support, or what the name in the moon supports. Those are just placeholders too.
Now, I figure you’re just going to say I’m trolling. I’m not. But such is life.
As for what I support, LOL @ me keeping that a secret. But I think it’s pretty cool that we can do in-thread polls, so here goes. Sabo is a …
An ACer
A Neo-Gorean
A Wobbly
por que no los dos o tres
Who the fuck knows, for the 10+ years he’s been around here, no one has been able to figure out what in god’s name he actually supports.
ACist roads built on top of roofs because the state is not building roads. I’m interested in the source - whether it is something real or just trolling.
A similiar situation, without the bad faith of the “what are you” assholes, is when fools used to precinct walk.
The last time it happened, while I was terrible busy watching sportsball, a quality milf knocked on my door. I answered the door. She tried to hand me some trash, while gibbering about how there were POTUS BOWL like frenzies over who was going to be the next dog catcher, or whatever, and wanted to talk to me about voting. I said: “Wait, you said ‘I’”? And she said yes, that was her pix on the trash, she was the candidate, and she wanted to talk to me about voting.
So since I was missing the sportsball, and she was a quality milf, I invited her in. I also gave her an extra copy i had around of the Industrial Worker, my unions newspaper. She said: “I want to talk to you about voting”. I said: “I want to talk to you about organizing”.
I let her babble on a short while about VoteHarder™ while I nodded along. Then while she caught her breath, I told her about the San Diego Free Speech Flight. She babbled some more about VoteHarder™, then I told her about about Desert Revolution. She couldn’t help herself, and started babbling about VoteHarder™ again, and I said: “You’re a native San Diegan. You want to be one our leaders. I’m sure you can tell me who won POTUS BOWL those years. But you know almost nothing about San Diego history. Doesn’t that give you some pause?”. She was a really good sport, took the IW with her, said she’d google this shiz, and went on her way.
Usually it went like this:
Fool: Here’s some trash.
me: Here’s an IW.
Fool: Why would I want to take that.
me: Because I want to talk to you about organizing.
Fool: I don’t got no time for that shiz.
me: But I guess I got infinite time to waste talking to fools like you. VoteHarder™ !!!1!
The ACers believed that competing private road companies were the bees knees. But sane people pointed out that these companies would have a block by block monopoly. So the ACers figured the competition would just built roads on the roofs that spanned the blocks to compete… or some other such impossibility.
Is it fair to say that there is consensus among most posters ITT that Landlordism is a problem and that Sabo believes that the solution is no landlords, while others believe that the solution is regulated landlords? And that this is an example of the general case of there being consensus that capitalism is flawed, but Sabo’s solution is abolishing capitalism while others would prefer to regulate capitalism?
I don’t doubt that at some instance some ACer said something about roads on rooftops, but I dunno how fair the representation is. My first and only relevant Google hit is from 2p2, so, like it’s probably not some common AC idea.
I guess this post started the whole roof roads thing? I am unfamiliar with Vegetarian’s body of work as a poster, but it seems like one ACer made a stupid suggestion as a response to a hypothetical and the idea became a meme on the site as various non-ACers asked ACers, especially Proph, to defend the idea and none of them would do so, perhaps because they thought it was part of a stupid game that they refused to play.
When I said I was prepared to answer questions about the eviction-free zone I currently occupy, I meant exactly that, so let’s modify this:
Just imagine yourself as a landlord. Evictions are banned. You own a €400,000 bungalow in Dublin that you want to rent out.
Assuming that’s cool, I’m imagining away.
Are you renting it to the minimum wage worker (has references and qualifies income wise but works in a factory), or are you renting to the wealthier tenant?
So we’re assuming that I’ve acquired this information about the two prospective tenants, in spite of the prohibition on requiring employment references, and that I do not fear a case being brought to the Residential Tenancies Board for discrimination. Jolly times for Landlord Flynn. I cheerfully and wholeheartedly choose the wealthier tenant. every single time.
But again, I really did more mean questions about the moratorium.
That said, I did a tiny amount of google trends looking, and it seems that 2+2 was already completely infested with ACers long the before the ACers short blip of trendyness (which pretty much coincided with the R.Paul Revo-scam-lution). Also, 2+2’s very own Nielsio created the banal square-v ACer logo.
Seems like a good faith attempt to engage you should include laying out a vision of what regulated landlords look like for you to react to instead of you having to provide a target for other people to take shots at.
Hi Sabo. Sorry for grunching a bit, but I’m curious to get your take on the argument I’m going to try to outline below. Note that I’m sure a lot of the points have been raised previously, but I’m curious whether you find this particular presentation at all persuasive.
Outlawing eviction disincentivizes the provision of for-profit housing
a. Without eviction for non-payment, profit is much more difficult to guarantee.
b. The impact is not equal across all for-profit housing; the role of the state, through eviction, in guaranteeing profits is much more pronounced in rentals targeting poorer, working class people. So forbiding eviction discincentivizes the provision of for-profit housing targeting poorer people in particular.
If there is less incentive to provide for-profit housing, then the supply of for-profit housing will decrease.
a. I think that if this were not true, it would call into question a lot of the premises in the anti-capitalist argument against landlordism.
b. This outcome is, in and of itself, a good thing. Especially because the particular type of for-profit housing that is most impacted (1b) is also the most exploitative, reducing the supply of this type of for-profit housing is a reasonable goal. Reducing the supply of for-profit housing might be an anti-capitalist goal in general.
If the supply of for-profit housing is reduced, and nothing else changes, then the total supply of housing will also be reduced.
a. While the reduction of exploitative for-profit housing is good, a reduction in the total supply of housing is probably counterproductive.
b. This leads to the conclusion that a ban on eviction is probably not enough by itself to achieve the overall goals of reducing homelessness or ending exploitative landlordism.
It is possible to reduce the supply of for-profit housing, especially of the most exploitative flavors, without reducing the overall supply of housing.
a. Banning evictions reduces incentives by making it more difficult to earn a reliable profit. But it’s not the only way of reducing the margins of the business.
b. One other way is to increase the supply of not-for-profit housing, e.g. through public housing programs.
c. While there are undoubtedly various issues with public housing, it’s also possible to separate public management of housing from public supply. In this argument, it’s the increase in supply of not-for-profit housing which has the effect of reducing the supply of exploitative for-profit housing. In terms of eliminating evictions, i’m interested in possibilities where government provides for construction but then hands over ownership in some way.
The conclusion of this line of reasoning, for me, is that it may make more sense to approach the evils of landlordism by promoting the supply of more not-for-profit housing, which at the very least is less exploitative, rather than trying to ban evictions directly.
There are many things I agree and disagree with ITT regarding capitalism, but not sure I should opine because title is specifically about landlords. I’ll just say that many don’t seem to understand what real capitalism is or at least my view of it. We do NOT live in a capitalist society now. We live under socialism for the wealthy. Airlines just got a huge tax cut and now two weeks in they want a bailout? Give me a break! in 2008 I thought the banks, auto industry etc., should be not just allowed, but forced to fail. And I feel the same way now. Capitalism was never meant to be designed to bail out billionaire shareholders and execs. The system we have now is fucked, but I don’t find true capitalism to be the culprit. Yes. I am a progressive who is also a capitalist just as I’m a social Democrat. I don’t feel that they are necessarily oxy-morons
This is the key point with the “what are you” game.
This is the situation the bad faith posters want to set up. That’s their interwebs “win”. My interwebs win is to frustrate them (while assiduously posting in good faith, although that shouldn’t need be said). Notice: I clipped out the part prior to the above quote. It doesn’t matter, it never does. Only the form matters.
To do this the bad faith posters need to get their victim contemporaneously “guessing at a world”. And to avoid the tables being turned, they need to avoid staking out any position themselves.
I frustrate them by refusing to “guess at a world”, by staking out a well sourced position, and by demanding that they stake out a position too.
And that’s why “I’m for X, you’re for ___” sends their lawnmowers into orbit.
We even have a pretty good example in the owner market. Right now the PMI insurance runs between 0.5% of the value of the property and 1% of the value, and this basically assume the lender can evict you and market the house. They probably expect to lose around 25% of the house’s value in an eviction between taking a loss on the sale and the costs of the eviction process itself.
In a world where the occupant can stop paying and the owner or lender cannot recover anything, it stands to reason the risk premium would be at least 4 times as high since the loss is 4 times as big. In reality it would likely be higher because the occupant has less skin in the game than the 3.5-19% equity a normal PMI payer has to lose from going into foreclosure. Perhaps higher, but 4 times as high would mean a non payment insurance of something like $500 to $1000 per month on top of the rent for a residence valued 300,000 per month. This is of course for people who have good enough credit to qualify for a mortgage today, for those that don’t, there is pretty much no risk premium that would be worth the owner’s time.
Does Sabo want no landlords? They certainly exist in the status quo he has been talking about. He has not chosen to defend another alternative for who pays the builders. Seems like he wants landlords to invest purchasing properties as before but not be able to get any return on that investment.
