Nevoic

There's a phenomenon in psychology called "crowding out", where extrinsic motivators (e.g money) can destroy intrinsic motivators (e.g passion), because they're more important (you need money to survive, you don't need passion).

The take that communism is bad for incentives and capitalism is good for incentives is far too naive. What capitalism can do effectively is make a large mass of people do a lot of work they don't want to do, and turn work they do want to do into a nightmare, where communism would instead focus on reducing the overall burden of unpleasant work, and find non-market solutions for distributing the unpleasant work.

Automating the bad away then becomes a positive instead of an existential threat to our existence. Many other contradictions of capitalism fall away when we look towards non-capitalists modes of production.

A lot of people frame non-market solutions as "compulsory", and market solutions as "free", even though again that's far too reductive, having the choice between starving and janitorial work isn't really a good faith choice, and yet these are the kinds of choices capitalism uses and calls the epitome of freedom.

Yeah I do, just on the principle that an environment that retaliates against worker solidarity is an oppressive environment.

It's similar to someone saying "can slaves be well taken care of by their owners?" Many people would say yes, but I would say no on principle. No matter how short the work day, no matter the benefits, months off every year, etc. I would say on principle that being owned means you're not well taken care of.

The principle here being that sometimes "one" negative can be enough to mean you're not "well-taken care of".

If you're in an environment that would retaliate against you for unionizing, you're not "well taken care of".

This is the idea of class action lawsuits, a bunch of people who normally can be kicked around by giant corporations, coming together and taking them to court because the corporation abused everyone in the same way.

So the answer here is a strong "maybe".

Do you actually hold this position in all situations? It was illegal to harbor Jewish fugitives in Nazi Germany, should those laws be respected?

When you say "no, of course not", maybe actually consider what your position is before posting. Because nobody's position is to just "respect laws" in all circumstances.

Reddit is an interest of mine, but I have no interest in going to reddit anymore. Is that an unimaginable position for you?

I actually convinced my boss to get us a ping pong table, all I had to do was forego my pay for a year!

Totally worth, since I'm not working for the money, I'm working for the culture (our culture is now a ping pong table). It's so awesome that I can use it during my state-mandated breaks 🙂

You can't tell someone they're being pseudo-scientific and then accuse them of being adversarial as if you're not.

I wasn't using circular reasoning, I was citing data. 90,000 rent controlled housing units in NYC are left vacant (this number has been rising). As we both understand, "individual" (either actually an individual or a corporation) capitalists act in their own best interests. They're not leaving these apartments vacant for years just because they want to fuck over poor people, they're doing it because they make more money off their other supply if these units are kept off the market.

If you don't want to feel like you're spouting alt-right talking points, stop using verbatim the talking points that capitalists use to defend housing scalpers. At best, your entire point is "housing scalpers aren't as big of a deal as this other problem", and at worst you're ignoring the real problem so capitalists can keep exploiting the housing market.

You haven't made a case in favor of housing scalpers, and for good reason, there's literally no case to be made for them. The capitalist position is that scalping houses isn't a big enough problem to have an effect on supply. Even if that were true (which would require 16 million housing units being vacant having no impact on housing supply), it doesn't mean that it couldnt be true in the future. What if the number rose to 30 million vacant units with the same population? Or 100 million? Or a billion? At some point it gets ridiculous. To me that's pretty clearly when you're at "we have 30x as many vacant houses as homeless people", but maybe your tolerance is much higher because homeless people aren't economically valuable to capitalists (except as a reserve army of labor).

No people don't "just have the option to move away", that's an incredibly naive way to look at the world, some people need to be in certain locations for social or work reasons.

Also, what I'm saying isn't a "theory", it's an observation of data. You keep trying to rationalize it away, but whatever way you slice it you can't get rid of the 16 million vacant houses that are not in use, while we have half a million homeless people and rising costs housing costs.

You seem to be insinuating that people don't just buy up housing and sit on it, like that's not a phenomenon that exists because you can't fathom why, despite my last comment clearly outlining several reasons how it could happen, and more importantly the fact that it does actually happen.

1. Monopolies in certain areas. Your response? "They can move"
2. Holding onto vacant rent controlled apartments to force people into more expensive units. Your response? "It wastes money" (untrue, in this situation it makes more money, which is why it happens in the real world).
3. There are 16 million vacant housing units while we have half a million homeless people. Your response? Nothing, I guess those people's interests aren't as important as preserving the right for housing scalpers to hoard unused property.

You didn't respond to anything I said. You essentially said "I agree and you're wrong" with some fluff, so uhm okay good talk buddy.

There are a ton of reasons why individuals/corporations would scalp housing units and hold onto them without opening them up to use, from laws requiring fair treatment of renters like in NYC (where 90,000 rent controlled apartments remain vacant), to "unified cartels" actually have incredibly large influence over some areas (there are some companies that hold 10s of thousands of housing units, like blackrock, and these corporations purposefully keep some vacant to inflate the price of all units and control supply).

But even if you want to just close your eyes and ignore my last paragraph, you can try to rationalize away the data, but the data will still be there. There are 16 million vacant housing units in the U.S. Even if you can't fathom any reason why these might exist, they still do, and they still impact supply even if you'd like to believe they don't.

Agreed lol, though iirc they're getting periodically DDOSed, so it's not just normal usage spikes.