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No one is forcing you to work
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
The new place for c/antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml
This server is no longer working, and we had to move.
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Date Created: June 21, 2023
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The Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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It's not scalping to hold onto something for years. That's the opposite of scalping, which is taking advantage of surges in demand for quick profit.
Owning land is not a necessity.
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.
The correct term for buying a thing at a lower value than you sell it for after a period of time is "investing"
What you need isn't stealing from people, it's changing zoning laws.
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).
You keep assuming that things you say are true but without any reasoning whatsoever behind those things. It is not "problematic" to own land.
If anything, what's problematic is legislating that people can't build on land they own
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.
Your proposal is that the idea of rent, itself, is a negative?
Yeah that's an insane take.
This is fun for a couple of reasons:
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.
I have to guess what you mean because you are not actually saying anything. If you're not interested in the conversation, don't have it.
I don't know what "extract wealth from the working class means" in this context, because working class people aren't exactly real estate investors, so I guessed rent.
This is what happens when you communicate with Twitter platitudes instead of actual thoughts.
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).
Imagine if we invented magic buildings that could hold more than one family. Imagine how many people could fit in a relatively small area.
Why, you could fit like 1.6 million people into 33 square miles, like in Manhattan.
If you let people build, it turns out they do. Zoning codes are the problem. And in Cali you know who votes for exclusionary zoning? Progressive liberals. Because terrible people live everywhere and believe every ideology.
Answers are practical, ideologies aren't. Let people build. Let "neighborhood character" evolve as a neighborhood does. Gentrify poor neighborhoods and subsidize the rent of the otherwise-displaced til their wages match local COL.
These are solvable problems. Blaming capitalism is absurd when capitalism was kneecapped over a generation ago.
I'm not a liberal, for whatever that's worth.
Sure, lets build more affordable housing, that's fine.
You ignored my entire point though and went on your own ideological ramble there (one paragraph saying we don't need ideology and the next defending capitalism. Do you read what you write? Lmfao).
Are you saying you don't believe supply/demand is a real thing? Or you just choose to ignore the impact that over 10 million housing scalpers would have on the U.S housing market?
If it's neither of those, then I guess we're in agreement, outlaw housing scalpers and build affordable housing. We could get median housing costs down to a fraction of what they are now, just like other societies have that outlawed scalpers.
Capitalism isn't an ideaology, it's an economic system.
Supply and demand is a real thing and demand vastly outstrips supply due to lack of ability to build.
But you don't have to take my word for it:
https://danville.ca.gov/CivicSend/ViewMessage/message/153105
I responded when lemmy.world was having issues, so my lemmy client couldn't find your comment and so it just responded at the top level: https://lemmy.world/comment/1975730
Lemmy is a dope forum but I think we're smothering their servers a bit lol
Agreed lol, though iirc they're getting periodically DDOSed, so it's not just normal usage spikes.