Aren’t conservatives all about innovation? Or maybe just libertarians?
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I seriously doubt that pod living is the solution anyone actually wanted, rather than a bandaid fix to a larger issue.
Yeah, like all free market solutions. Because free market solutions aren’t designed to solve problems; rather, they’re necessarily designed to extract value from customers (or however you’d like to phrase making people pay for things).
Imagine a private weapons development program: not that much innovative stuff that’s cost-effective and very efficient and funnels money into the hands of amoral CEOs who have no problem being the scourge of the earth. Way better, right?
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If you genuinely believe any market is free, then you’re further removed from reality than you think I am.
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The rhetoric of free markets, which allows abuse and monopoly, is to blame for government intervention.
The housing market is a good example. The free market rhetoric favors allowing rent to rise into the stratosphere. Better the price be too high than rent control. Once market influences are distorted, so the rhetoric goes, all sorts of bad things are gonna happen.
So prices keep rising, more people keep becoming homeless, and the government eventually says enough: rent control. And it works for a bit. People that would’ve been priced out now get to stay. Yay!
But it doesn’t work in the long run. It can’t work in the long run. Over time, the distance between what prices should be and rent control increases. Landlords know damn well they can get more if they do literally anything other than rent their rent-controlled homes and condos. So, when a vacancy shows up, it’s not listed, something else is done with it. (I believe in New York back in the day, landlords would turn apartments in apartment buildings into condominiums).
And goes the story of housing and rent control. And it’s often used as an example of government inefficiency and incompetence.
But the counterfactual is never discussed: what happens when everyone is homeless, apartments with sky-high rents are are vacant or only inhabited by those wealthy enough to afford them? What is the free market response to that? It doesn’t have one and everyone knows that. Neoclassical economic prescriptions are not a solution to anything. They never are. They cannot be. The purpose of a business isn’t to solve social problems; Friedman said as much. It’s to make money, generate profit, increase revenues.
To the extent these pods make money in a rent-controlled area, they are innovative in a soul-sucking, misanthropic, neoclassical economic sense. And what’s retarded about making money anyway? Are the rich and wealthy retarded?
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A free market leads to lobbying the government for barriers to entry which creates monopolies.
Landlords intentionally turned it from a “free market” to the shit show we have today.
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That’s an incredibly simplified take.
No, that’s not really aligned with politics. Maybe democrats though.
Wow, for prices comparable to rent in most other states?
I have a crazy idea: move elsewhere.
Or you know, we could actually fix the problem instead of bitching at the victims?
Lol, I’m not bitching at the “victims” you nerd. I’m pointing out the absurdity of living in a sardine can instead of relocating to a place, any place, that is better and less densely populated and cheaper to live than LA.
There comes a point where people stop being victims, and willingly subjecting oneself to living in an overpriced, overpopulated, crime ridden city is entirely self inflicted.
Lol, I’m not bitching at the “victims” you nerd.
You’re the one who is telling people to upend their lives to go somewhere else because of a problem they didn’t cause.
They’re living in a crowded place. They caused it by definition.
Yeah, people sure do choose where they’re born.
I never said they caused it by choice, but I promise you it’s easier to move out of an expensive place than to move into one.
Yeah, but that require LA to have been wrong about their politics
Which ones?
I still can’t tell if you’re trolling or if you really just don’t understand a lot of things. Like when you acted baffled that we like workers.
But in short: we have limited resources. 33% of LA are immigrants, LA housing market is fucked up, and they also can’t build tall because earth quakes. They’re out of space, and they still want to import more people.
Like when you acted baffled that we like workers.
9 times out of 10 when pro-worker legislation is killed, it’s killed by republicans.
https://jacobin.com/2023/01/gop-republican-party-working-class-interests-pro-worker
they also can’t build tall because earth quakes
What an awful part of the liberal agenda, being constrained by nature.
LA housing market is fucked up
No thoughts as to why that’s the case?
. 33% of LA are immigrants
The entire country is a country of immigrants.
This argument is not worth it.
But I will clarify, the earth quakes are just nature, no one can’t change it. It’s a somewhat unusual constraint that LA deals with.
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