bitsplease

Of course buildings cost money, no one is suggesting that the tenants of these public housing buildings don't pay rent. Just that the rent is set at a rate that simply recoup costs instead of making the landlord (which in this case is the state) rich in the deal. And if states don't have the funds to invest in the property, I'm pretty sure the state governments would qualify for some pretty solid mortgages. And the costs of those mortgages can be added onto the rent - same as a landlord would do, only in this case, that would be the end of the rent padding.

I can't help but feel like you're deliberately misinterpreting me at this point. That, or you're just incapable of fathoming how human beings could possibly interact without one profiting off the other. The renters still pay rent, the mortgages on the property still get paid, the only difference is that the profit that would have gone to the landlord stays in the tenants pockets. That's it - that's literally the only difference. No free houses, no huge tax bills, just the removal of profit, and at-cost rents for folks who need them.

Demand isn't high because so many more people prefer to rent - demand is high because it's the only financially viable option. Why is it the only financially viable option? Because landlords (both corporate and personal) buy up all the property they can and rent it out. Because so many houses are getting bought as rentals, the supply of houses that can actually be bought is low.

Seriously, have you spoken to anyone who has tried to buy a house in the last few years? Every single one I know had a myriad of stories like "I put down an offer, but some investment company offered $20k over asking, cash in hand"

And because housing prices are so high because of the above behavior, more and more people are forced to rent, who would have 100% been able to buy a house not that long ago. And so rises demand.

If what you were saying was true (that rent prices are high purely because people love renting, and no one wants to be a homeowner), then why are we seeing sky high home prices at the same time? You're quick to pull out a half baked supply and demand theory, but you're very quick to ignore the other side of that equation.

Also, more fundamentally the whole "supply and demand explains all commerce" thing has been thoroughly untrue for ages. Maybe in a world without giant multinational conglomerates, political corruption, and price fixing. But in the real world, things are wildly more complicated

Yeah I think it's less that people are setting unrealistic expectations for a Bethesda game, and more that people are getting fed up with being told they should be happy with all the faults "because it's Bethesda".

Bethesda gets a really weird pass in the gaming industry and when it comes to shallow content and bugs. I think a lot of that comes from the modability of their games, so that with mods and a few years of patches, the games often end up being a lot of fun - but the fact is that the games themselves, as released by Bethesda are usually hollow shells by comparison.

For instance it always irks me when people say Skyrim VR is the best VR game - you literally need a couple dozen mods just to make it function as an actual VR game (lack of 3d audio in a VR game is just unforgivable imo, let alone any actual physics interactions).

I think people are just starting to get fed up with Bethesda's business model of building barebones games and counting on modders to make it fun. And then people get further fed up when they say so online and get told things like "but yeah it's Bethesda, what did you expect?"

No one wants to pay for any of that ever tho

Pay for what? Again, I'm not talking about subsidized housing here, just at-cost rentals. The only people paying are the renters, they're just paying significantly less because they're not funding some random person/corporation's no-effort-required retirement plan.

Idk about Canada but public housing in the US sucks.

I'm in the US, and idk where you live but public housing in my area is both high quality and super affordable (granted I live in a very liberal state, where such things are given priority). The only issue is that there isn't enough of it, but that would be solved if we switched to public housing for rentals instead of landlords. If your area has "sucky" public housing, you should advocate for improvements in your community and vote for local policy makers who will prioritize it.

You seem to have this odd insistince that you can't possibly have rental properties without someone leeching profits off the top of the whole deal

Yeah I don't see how this would provide any additional benefit, even if tires were literally the only thing you had to work with

But I understand that it is a mature decision to vote who you see as the lesser evil with a chance.

Idk if I'm having a stroke, or you are - but this sentence makes no sense to me - though I think I can guess at your point from context, and I broadly agree - at least up until the point that you claim that voting for the "lesser evil" exonerates you of any responsibility for the actions of the party you voted for.

No, not at all? If I am one of two plumbers in a town and someone randomly kills the other plumber I profit from that, but I have 0 responsibility for the murder

Except in that example, you didn't help give power to the murderer, whereas for the actions of our government, we do.

There is some responsibility, but not exactly the same as if you were a perpetrator yourself.

Not exactly the same, no - I agree. I the same way that if you came across an ongoing hate crime on the street and cheered on the perpetrator you wouldn't bear the same responsibility as the actual perpetrator, but it still makes you evil in my opinion.

Most people are not utilitarian, or at least I hope they aren't.

I disagree, I think most people's natural approach to ethics (when they bother with it at all) is to compare the net harm vs the net good of the action their trying to weigh. That's literally how we teach children the difference between right and wrong - we ask them to consider the consequences of their actions, and whether those consequences are good or bad).

Either way - I think it's clear you're not changing your mind on this, and I'm just repeating myself, so unless you have some novel point to raise I'm done arguing about it. Feel free to continue to distance your decisions with their consequences for others if you prefer (lord knows most people do, unless those consequences are bad for themselves)

Well yes, hence my last sentence - there will always be some people who have to rent (or just prefer it), and for those people, we could have public housing. Basically housing that's treated as a public infrastructure - run not for profit, but for public good. It's really not that hard to grasp - remove the landlords from the equation, and set the rent prices to exactly the cost of maintaining the properties.

If you remove the landlords leeching away extra value for investment profit, and instead just charged what it cost to make the housing available, it'd be cheaper by definition. Providing essential services at an affordable cost is literally the whole point of civil infrastructure

You don't need landlords to give people a place to rent, in the same way I don't need to pay someone to bring water to my house, or haul my sewage away, I use the public utilities in my area. And I'm not even talking about subsidizing the cost with tax dollars (though I think that's a good idea), you could give renters significant savings simply by not trying to make money off them

The reason so many can't afford to buy is because so many houses are bought purely to be rented back out again, if no landlords existed housing prices would drop and more people could afford to buy.

For those who still couldn't, as others have said - public housing

I love this game to death. But the multi-player has been dead the last few times I've tried to play. Maybe this sale will breathe a bit of life back into it for a few weeks at least

Except that I that example, as you say - they have no actual choice in the matter because as you say it doesn't matter who they vote for. That being said, I think we all do bear some small share of the responsibility for the atrocities our country has committed, if only because we benefit from them - but that's a whole other debate.

My point is that every conservative has a very easy choice each election - support the conservative party, or oppose them. If they choose the former, that's their right, but theyre responsible for having made that decision, and don't get to pretend that all the terrible shit the GOP is doing, all the way up to it's ongoing attempts to subvert the election process and undermine the justice system, is somehow not their responsibility, despite voting for it.

And in the interest of fairness, the same goes for the Dems. I bare some sense of responsibility for Biden's union busting of the railworkers strike last year for having voted for him. That's how it works. But I think any rational person looking at the two parties from a utilitarian standpoint of ethics can see pretty easily that the evils of the GOP vastly outweighs that of the Democratic party

Yeah well without a non-pay walled source, I can't verify that

Yeah and my response to that would be the last sentence of my comment.