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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • Something completely realistic, right?

    Buddy, the world is a dumpster fire right now and it’s only getting worse.

    I don’t watch films for realism. I want the billionaires to get fed into their drug crushing machine*, or sucked out of the window of their private jet, or get minced by their giant drill or blown up in their yachts.

    I want the good guys to win for a change.

    *yes, I know this was a henchman. Don’t @ me




  • There are many reasons why renting is better for some people and buying is better for others.

    Renting gives you the flexibility to just up sticks and leave at a known notice period. You don’t have to worry about the boiler breaking, or mould/damp, or the roof coming off (or like I’m about to have to deal with, a fence panel getting blown away in a storm) because your contact with the landlord says they’ll fix that for you.

    There should absolutely be that choice available.

    The problem, at least in the UK and probably elsewhere, is that renting is just SO expensive that it’s not possible to rent and save money, meaning that if your goal is to buy, you can’t because you can’t raise the deposit, even if paying a mortgage on a similar sized property would actually be cheaper on a monthly basis.

    Sure, you read stories about people who are wonderful landlords, they don’t raise rents, or at least, by less than market rates, they’re quick to fix any problems the tenants have, all that good stuff.

    Equally, you read stories about people who are basically renting from Satan and all the things I mentioned above take months or years to get fixed, if ever. (Slumlords are definitely people who should be put up against the wall and shot come the revolution)

    I’m assuming the vast majority are somewhere in the middle.

    But the fact that you’ll probably rent for at least some of your life shouldn’t drain all your money into someone else’s mortgage. As I said in that other post, housing of some form should be a basic human right. And the fact that individuals or companies can buy many houses and leave them empty because they can afford to have rents set so high that most people can’t afford them? That’s just wrong.



  • To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.

    Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.

    It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.


  • Lemming421@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.

    If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.

    We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.

    *local or national, I don’t really care which


  • Lemming421@lemmy.worldtoVideos@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    Are you sure they’re not just slacking off and claiming the computer is slow?

    Sure, you’re not running multiple CAD programs on a base model Air, but it’s a perfectly capable machine for web browsing, Electron apps, Citrix, MS Office, PDFs, usual desktop stuff.

    And the base model Air is less than a grand - if you’re spending $1.5k, you’re getting more than 8GB RAM.