When I was in college for a CS degree, just about every single classmate I asked said they were planning on going into game dev, when you have entire graduating classes all gunning for the same positions in a relatively niche field, you can pay peanuts and still fill roles

Don’t expect much lol, when I pointed out that this was inevitable the most common response was “who cares?”

Privacy is dead mainly because your average person doesn’t actually care about it

I don’t really care whether people know or not.

Going out of your way to make a comment about it is an interesting choice then lol

People aren’t downvoting you because they disagree with your lifestyle, but your comment is like going into a thread about veganism and saying “fuck yall I’m gonna eat a cheese burger every day until I die”. A valid personal decision, but not really relavent to the conversation unless you just wanted everyone to know you’re different

Regarding the societal collapse point, I really doubt that gold would be much in that scenario unless you can escape somewhere where things are relatively “normal”, in a genuine survival situation, bread is worth more than gold

Fair point, makes cash customers trickier, but for better or worse, more and more people don’t use cash anyways, so that might be a non issue

Also how do you handle things that pop up mid meal? Like a second beer/cocktail with your meal.

I think a deposit when you sit down makes the most sense. If paying by card, then just keep their card on file for the duration of the meal, if cash, then do a small deposit per person - less than the cost of the meal, but enough to make dining and dashing really not worth the risk/effort.

Not exactly perfect, but itd work

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

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

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 agree in principle, though I have a hard time seeing it going any other way than real estate developers getting even richer because now they just need to bribe lobby whatever politician is in charge of it for all the best deals

I think I read somewhere that zuck uses chartered jets, so there isn’t really a way to track it