And those competent people would have to put up with career position squatters who can't be fired but are just obstructive, or political career squabblers as bad or worse than private sector.
855 karma · joined November 5, 2016
Why would rents go down? It might go up?
20 years from how as a renter your ongoing costs will be high.
20 years from now as a home owner with the mortgage lower and inflation on everything higher, your ongoing costs will be low.
Owning a house is an exercise in deferred gratification, similar to owning most businesses.
If you are going to make that business unprofitable then no one will do it. People won't sign up for the risk, cost, effort and frustrations of being a landlord with no upside.
While we're on the topic, why not prevent programmers from putting their salary up? After all software is essential to society these days?
Manipulating people to buy stuff they don't need (advertising, marketing, hollywood) is immoral in so many ways. Weapons are very questionable, massive markups on basic stuff (cosmetics) etc etc if you go on about 80% of our economy is actually immoral. Even foods which are a basic good, are generally bottom dollar hollowed out poisons compared to what they could be if health was the primary concern. Don't get me started on the corruptions of profit to the medical process.
I don't know what your problem is about housing but it seems out of perspective if you're not going to campaign against profit from just about everything.
Reality is landlords are in all different situations, some have spare money above costs of interest, rates, insurances, rental agent fees, etc etc and can use that to pay for maintenance. Many are putting in their own money to pay for maintenance, the same way they put in their own money to afford the deposit and purchase costs.
And when there's a problem a landlord can't just ring the first inflate-a-quote contractor and open up the unlimited checkbook you seem to be ascribing to them, they will be bankrupt very quickly if they did. Instead, they have to assess the issue, try to find a economical solution, get multiple quote and spend time finding a contractor who can do it reasonably well the first time at an affordable cost. That is not the same work as a farmer, but it sure is work. If it's not done the house quickly becomes unlivable with a broken toilet or whatever and being unlivable is also unrentable and produces no value to anyone. It's work, and it's important to keep the house functioning.
Really as you seem to think landlords do nothing but profit, similar to gnomes and underpants, perhaps you should give it a try yourself. If nothing else it will be quite a learning opportunity!
Living in a teepee is looking more attractive by the day haha.
Most people are getting drip fed curated content to 'influence' them, which has a very different agenda to accuracy regarding real things.
Also most people are not selecting real things, they are selecting entertainment.
If you had just said connecting to real things, agreed that sometimes it is, plus a lot of false things, plus heaps of fantasy/entertainment. But when you said its connecting us more accurately to the real state of things, well thats just false.
Accuracy in echo chambers that create information bubbles as socmed systems do is simply impossible, then the fact these systems are used to influence not inform makes them produce highly distorted minds.
Calling it patriarchy is just another in the long stream insults to maleness that has become common, in the worst sense of the word common.
Dependency heavy environments such as e.g. node or python make it a nightmare. But large stable base library environments with selectively chosen dependencies are usually easy to manage, e.g. .NET.
When people talk about an interest rate, a growth rate, an inflation rate .. everything compounds.
If you're saying 5% of some special non compounding thing thats misleading to people without financial literacy to compare to every other rate they read.
So it's more correct to say 3.53%.
While the location is the same in a geographic sense as in 1900, a google maps view of that era would show them being in a small town compared to a city with incredible amenities these days.
To compare the 1946 houses location you need to pick something with the same level of amenity, which will be probably a country town.
The prices are based on the ability to repay based on the income - with lower interest rates the same income and service a much larger loan, hence the increased prices.
The world has changed, from very high rates to current very low rates, and seems like it might be changing back to middle rates.
Your measure of market share is a reasonable one, as are the two I proposed being profit and creating and succeeding in entirely new markets.
They are new markets too, it's not rockets, it's reusable rockets at incredibly lower cost to orbit and new capacities to previous ones, it's space based communication networks that are again a serious generational leap ahead of whatever was before, it's the emergence of a serious replacement for ICE vehicles. In all these markets, his companies are the only market share! He owns these markets, because he created them, and is multiple years ahead of the rest of the world's highly motivated competitors.
I'm not detracting from the successes of the other guys you mentioned. But Musk can very reasonably be called the world's most successful businessman at the moment on multiple metrics.
It might be a competition between Musk and others, but it's the opposite utterly inept, which was the point - trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the OP per HN guidelines, while also keeping the discussion grounded in rational sanity.