Nevoic @ Nevoic @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Whether or not it's helpful is orthogonal to whether it's true, which is more what I'm concerned with. Maybe there's a point to be had about effectively trying to convince people, but I don't have an obligation to be the most effective conversationalist or converter.

However I'd happily support systemic approaches to reducing the effectiveness of housing scalpers. Calling them immoral is not mutually exclusive with supporting legislation against them. I'd even say those things are usually aligned.

Is calling me insane an "actual thought"? You expect more from me than from yourself.

Just because you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm not saying anything. Not to say it's not my fault, language is a two way street. But similarly, it's not only my fault, you shouldn't just assume that your misunderstanding necessarily means I don't have a position. Maybe you think you're infallible and incapable of misunderstanding, but I assure you you're not, and I hope you understand that.

When you scalp land, you're reducing the supply of land. I assume you have an at least rudimentary understanding of supply/demand, so you know that reducing supply increases cost with no changes in demand (fun sidenote, demand for housing is actually increasing as population increases, so this effect is even more pronounced).

This increased cost in housing/land will be felt by the working class. So as an externality of your profitting off increases in land value (caused in part by this scalping), the working class will have to spend more on housing.

So owners get more money and workers get less money.

What we see in societies that don't have this gross feedback loop is housing costs that remain healthily at 5-10% of median income. Our society is instead at 30-80%, and it's growing relative to wages (not just inflation).

This is fun for a couple of reasons:

1. That's not what I said nor what I believe
2. You just commented complaining about me not giving reasoning, despite me writing hundreds of words clearly outlining my reasoning.

Your reasoning? "Your insane".

Stop being a hypocrite. It'd be great if you could both explain your position, while also not strawmanning mine.

If you don't want to, that's fine too, but then you should stop dragging on a useless conversation and do something you want to do.

The reasoning (as I've clearly outlined several times) is that restricting access to land/shelter in the name of extracting money from the working class is a bad societal outcome. I would imagine you agree with that, but if you don't we're having the wrong conversation.

You can call it scalping, yeegstrafing, investing, whatever. I recognize that depending on what you call it, people will have different emotional responses to it. If you call it scalping, it'll be negative. Investing it'll be positive. Yeegstrafing, probably just confusion.

But playing with words isn't the game I'm trying to play, I have a contention with the action, not the word choice. People shouldn't be allowed to invest in certain things, you can agree. Like you shouldn't be able to buy up humans at a low value and sell them at a higher value later. Even if you called it investing, it'd still be impermissible.

Similarly, restricting access to land/shelter, driving up prices by reducing supply, and then later selling your hoarded supply at an excess due to said price driving is problematic. It's restricting cheap access to housing so some people can "make" money.

Using "scalping" as the word to describe this highlights its parasitic nature, they're siphoning value out of the economy and restricting access to shelter/land while doing it.

Using "investing" instead ignores the negative societal ramifications, and only focuses on the positive personal outcomes (generating money for yourself).

GPU scalping isn't technically scalping either by some definitions, but the layman usage of the word is "buying up a product and selling it back at an inflated price". Someone is still a GPU scalper even if it takes them 2 years to resell some stock.

By this definition, housing scalpers are scalpers too. I'm not in the business of prescribing how people should speak, so if you have some academic issue with the word "scalping" I can choose a different one. We'll call it "yeegstrafing", but my contention is still the same despite what you call it.

People correctly have an issue with GPU yeegstrafers, because they're not providing any value, they're just hoarding excess goods and reselling to make a profit. Housing/land yeegstrafers are doing the same thing with necessities.

You may claim that housing or land more generally (you need land for housing/shelter) is not a necessity, but larger society disagrees. People generally regard shelter+food+water as the basic necessities. If someone successfully hoarded all the land, nobody would have access to shelter.

A lot of Americans have negative net worth, so everyone cashing out would likely mean you're still in debt, which is one of the ways our society keeps people trapped.

There's a difference between legal rights and moral rights. Legally you're correct, but 150 years ago people legally had the right to buy slaves, but they didn't have the moral right to.

Similarly, people have the legal right to buy hundreds of acres of land and hold onto it until it increases in value, and then sell it later. This is immoral though, it's scalping. We all understand scalping is bad when it's through the lens of GPUs or consoles because we weren't raised hearing about how "smart investors" invested in GPUs, we just heard about "investing" in housing or land.

If you have a solid argument why scalping houses or land should be permissible and even praised, while scalping GPUs/consoles should be impressible or at least scolded, I'd love to hear why.

I'd assert that scalping necessities is actually worse than scalping luxury goods.

No sufficiently sophisticated political ideology is against labor (capitalist work is not synonymous with labor). On the contrary, most anti-capitalist ideologies are extremely pro-labor.

The question isn't whether we need labor, that's reductive and (currently) we obviously do. The question is how should labor be treated. Right now labor is a commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. If we instead setup a system that decommodified labor, outlawing renting of humans (just as we have with buying humans), then even in a market-based economy you have far better compensation for labor.

Market-value for labor in a capitalist society is done as a commodity as I've previously said, so the goal is to reduce the price of the commodity as far as allowable for the business owners. This means a viable path towards profitability is reducing the labor force, or cutting compensation. This is why layoffs happen when companies are doing incredibly well, to increase immediate profits.

If instead there was a democratic assembly of workers that held their interests in common, there'd be no reason to just layoff a bunch of great workers during times of good business.

In short, we don't need two different classes with two different relationships to capital. Instead of allowing one class to rent the other, compensate them as little as possible, and pocket the surplus value, outlaw that commodification of humans and allow the market to properly compensate workers.

This isn't an end all solution, but market socialism is a massive improvement over capitalism, and once we dismantle the parasitic owner class (capitalists, landleeches, cops, etc.) we can focus on more interesting discussions about the merits of markets in certain situations (e.g they're good at reacting to consumer desires, they're bad at accounting for externalized costs like climate change, etc.)

It's illegal to homestead in the United States without first buying the land from whoever owns it already, even if the land is entirely unused. This means you need a massive injection of capital, the kind of capital that would mean you're in the top 10% of Americans (at least) in terms of wealth, exactly the kinds of people who aren't looking to escape society. This isn't even mentioning the kinds of building permits and other stamps of approval from the government you'd need to do this, also requiring capital and often licensing by a trained professional.

Of course you can just find unused land and roll the dice on getting caught. A lot of communes have done this successfully, but not everyone is comfortable doing something that is technically illegal.

A lot of people in the top 10% are still working class, and would benefit from a dismantling of capitalism, but they're not so poor that leaving society is favorable, just reforming society.

For the people who would benefit from leaving society, they're coerced to stay via laws written by and for the powerful (enforcing private property rights for example, denying access to unused lands).

I'm on Linux full time for programming and gaming. I play battle.net games (WoW, hearthstone, overwatch, HoTS, WoW classic), League of Legends, and a lot of steam games. I have virtually no issues. I have a ryzen 5900x and a RTX 3080.

The key to Linux gaming (outside of steam) is Lutris. You just search the game you want to install, and it installs all the dependencies needed automatically and you can launch the game from one place. They even have a simple 1 click button for adding steam games too if you want a single launcher for every game you have (this is what I do).

The only issues I really have are with EAC, like DKO didn't work for a bit after it came out (but does now), and Valorant/Fortnite don't work (they can easily enable Linux EAC but choose not to). I happen to not play these games so it's a non-issue for me, but worth mentioning.

League of Legends is also worth mentioning as having more issues than the rest. Usually I can run the game for months or even a year+ with no issues, but earlier this year the game was virtually unplayable on Linux for about 6 days due to a bug Riot Games added. This bug also effected Windows users, but to a much less extent. They would get disconnected once every couple games, while Linux users would get disconnected once every couple minutes. The League of Linux community is amazing though, and people were troubleshooting it constantly and making it more and more playable (getting to Windows parity on the bug), until Riot Games fixed it on their end.

I even helped my brother swap from Windows to Linux recently. He isn't super into Linux or anything, but he was having consistent issues on Windows with his monitor turning off in games, specifically League. We tried reinstalling drivers, watching temps, reinstalling League (since it didn't happen in other games), and uninstalling certain apps that can add overlays (though they were disabled). Some of these issues seemed to fix it until it returned usually hours or days later. Eventually we gave Linux a try and the issue is entirely gone. It's likely that resetting windows would work too, but he dual boots and it's easier to not have to reinstall everything.

That's the idea, but in practice since the data exists independently on each server, it takes network time and computational time for them to align. In practice I expect comments to function as you expect, and upvotes to be slightly off depending on which instance you're viewing from.

Things get a bit more weird when an instance gets defederated from another instance. My understanding here is that if you have instance A defederate from instance B, but instance B was listening to some of instance A's communities, that instance B will have an independent replica of that community that doesn't sync (this happened with beehaw federation from open registration instances like lemmy.world).

Over 85% of Mozilla's income comes from their Google search deal. Google is keeping Mozilla alive to prevent antitrust issues. If Mozilla rocks the boat too much, Google will fund a more obedient alternative.

No, they use ActivityPub underneath, so you can go to kbin/mastodon communities/users/etc. from Lemmy and vice versa.

"from a private third party" where? A (non-foolish) socialist would advocate for rules against renting people, just like we're not allowed to buy people right now.

That would mean there would be no private third parties that are renting out factories of rented workers.

If what you're saying is "from a private third party outside the socialist space", then that's a problem for all kinds of socialist spaces. We can't control productive forces outside of the space we have domain over.

It sounds like the market socialists you've been talking to haven't been socialists if they're in favor of private property, that's strictly a capitalist position. They're probably just welfare capitalists.

An actual market socialist is against private entities owning the means of production, they're owned communally by some mechanism (be it some democratically run cooperative, the state, etc .) It wouldn't be a group of stakeholders that are a separate, private entity disconnected from the workers (though the state arguably is an entity like that, and that's where the line between state socialism and state capitalism gets blurry).

I'm a huge anti-capitalist/socialist, and often times I find it useful to use this mix-up of markets and capitalism in my favor.

When people say "but we need capitalism because the alternative to markets is so bad" I say plainly that I'm not advocating against markets, I'm advocating against classes. The vast majority of self-described capitalists aren't trying to defend massive corporations or employer exploitation, they're defending markets.

If all those pro market capitalists became market socialists, dismantling capitalism would be far easier, then we could have much more interesting discussions about the merits of markets and when to use them versus centralized planning, without a leech class exploiting wage slaves or scalping houses.

We have 3 paths forward:

• liberal capitalist solution (à la Tucker Carlson): ban AI and allow workers to do bullshit jobs
• alternative liberal capitalist solution: let excess workers die in the streets because they're no longer needed for production
• socialist solution: distribute the means of production (AI in this case) so we can share equitably in its output

I'd advocate for the socialist one, it sounds like you might be more in line with Tucker Carlson's thinking here?

My alternative to a fascist America is a non-fascist one. Fascists are reactionaries, they see the writing on the wall and they come out of hiding.

As boomers die off, the percentage of bigots in relation to the total population will continue to drop. Instead of giving them safe refuge in another country, we actively combat these fascist ideologies, and also allow their main proponents to die off naturally.

And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it's hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we'd be at war within a decade.

Imagine going to a niche subreddit, calling everyone in it a shitbag, and then using anything remotely hostile thrown back at you as evidence that you're right.

Let us live in peace, you're free to keep paying for tortured animal carcasses (and thank God, imagine how cruel a world it would be where animal abuse/killing was outlawed /s) and we're free to eat plants.

I don't go to meat eater communities and call out everyone there for paying into systems that abuse and torture sentient creatures, even though I would be just stating facts about what people are doing, not calling them names like you are.