trias10 @ trias10 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Rent didn't shoot up, how could it, the whole point of the law was it was frozen.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees in this entire conversation: rent has been skyrocketing everywhere, in every G8 country, for the last 20 years. Especially in places like London, NYC, LA, Seattle, Paris, Toronto, Bay Area, etc. Hell, even in Salt Lake City where I used to live my rent went from £1816/mon to £2600/mon for the same flat, in just 2 years. And none of those cities have classic rent control (NYC has a few places which have it, but overall it doesn't). So clearly with a free market, pure capitalist approach, rents have only been skyrocketing. Same thing for housing to buy, have you tried buying a house lately?

So to claim that rent control or rent freezes lead to higher rentals or less supply is wrong, because rents are going up in a free market too, and supply is already at an all time low (hence the prices shooting up).

So you're fucked in either situation. The real problem is there just isn't enough supply of shelter for people, and that's because if you leave it to the free market, there's no incentive to build affordable housing with no profit. Hence, because shelter is something required by citizens, government should be building it even at a huge loss. Just like government provides fire brigade and military at a financial loss, because people need these things. You don't leave essential services to the private market because it may not be profitable to do them, for example, rural communities have shite internet, why? because it's not profitable to dig and lay fibre optic cable into some rural hinterland for just a few hundred customers. So in Norway, the government steps in lays that fiber optic at a financial loss because it wants its citizens to have a better life. Same for housing. If the private sector isn't doing it, the government should be. Just like in the 60s.

Depends on your definition of "success." Countries such as Holland, France, Canada, Germany, and China all have caps on the amount by which a landlord can increase rent in any given year, usually by law it's less than 5%, or indexed to inflation (but with 5% as the max). These laws are incredibly popular with renters and have been around for decades.

Berlin implemented a hard rent freeze in 2020 which was extremely popular with renters, but not with landlords, naturally.

However, rent control isn't just a hard price cap like back during the war, there are many nuanced aspects, see here for information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

I unfortunately can't read that article as it's paywalled, but looking at the link, it's an Opinion piece, so not factual reporting. It's also from Bloomberg, one of the most pro-capitalist publications out there, second only to The Economist in its championing of all things pro globalist and pro capitalist.

The main stream media which is all very pro capitalist (as they're all owned by billionaire oligarchs) has been shitting on rent control for decades.

Here's a more nuanced article on the matter which doesn't come from such a pro-capitalist, classical economic outlook: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

Capitalist/free market* economists.

Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It's only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.

I totally agree, we should treat animals the same as we treat humans. I really don't understand why so many people value animal lives lesser to those of humans.

Is it possible to eat those humans? If it's actually nutritious I don't see a problem, and it's less wasteful, as you said. Soylent Green operated on this principle.

I'm afraid you genuinely lost me.

I said I'm all for free mental healthcare and housing, but even these don't seem to solve the problem. Nor does just throwing money at the problem. So I have no ideas for how to solve the issue, besides maybe just dismantling capitalism entirely, but this also comes with problems.

Maybe, but even Norway has hardly stamped out homelessness completely. Far from it actually, there are some parts of Oslo which have immensely high levels of homelessness. Not as bad Skid Row in LA, but not far behind either.

It's not nearly so trivial. Having lived in Norway for many years, a country which does have unconditional free healthcare (including mental health), and free access to housing, they still have a large homeless population and plenty of street crime.

No one would be happier than me with this solution, but it will never realistically happen in our lifetimes. And even if it somehow came to happen eventually, given the entrenchment of current elites, it would only happen with an immense cost in human lives and violence, and a massive drop in living standards in the immediate aftermath before some utopia is created.

Current day -> neo Soviet revolution -> Mad Max -> the last of us? -> ??? -> Bernie Sanders Utopia

I'd love to mate, but I honestly don't know how. One thing I have to come to realise is that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't work. Norway, London, NYC, and California both spends billions each year on homelessness and the problem is only getting worse every year in all those places.

Maybe a good place to start would be opening up free sanitariums again where homeless people with mental issues could be housed, as sadly the streets have become the new dumping ground for people with severe mental illness.

Beyond that, am not sure, besides a total dismantling of capitalism.

I hate to burst your bubble, but it's not just an America problem. Have you been to Paris lately and seen the homelessness situation there, especially on the Metro?

Or in Oslo, where homeless Roma people attack people in broad daylight at Nationalteatret station and steal their luggage?

It's a big problem everywhere, and attitudes like the type you describe aren't relegated solely to Americans.

Am not defending this law at all, but the thinking behind it is twofold:

1. you might be handing out tainted or expired food
2. the bigger issue: you are creating a "nuisance" on the property where you're doing it, as large groups of homeless people gather there. Some would say it's a safety concern, for example handing out free food at the corner of a primary school.

Again, I'm not agreeing with either point, but these are arguments I have heard from people who back such laws.

To the second point though, I've seen it firsthand. Salt Lake City tried to do a good thing by making the public library a homeless-friendly zone by handing out free food and allowing access to WiFi. This caused a large amount of homeless to hang out there all the time, and some of them would harass and attack non-homeless patrons of the library to the point that pretty much all of them stopped coming to the library entirely, and the area became a no-go zone.

The real issue is that a large amount of homeless people have severe mental illnesses (since public sanitariums all closed in the 70s). So where there are big congregations of homeless, there will inevitably be harassment and possible violence. Cities don't want people feeding the homeless at any old public building to avoid these situations, hence the laws, which allow you to do it only at certain places the city allows.

I agree entirely, which I guess brings both of us back to the original OP in that people succumb to apathy and helplessness when dealing with climate change. The great unwashed masses will never agree to policies which curtail their economic prosperity or inconvenience them, and capitalism will never agree to anything which halts its self-serving pursuit of profits. So it's Waterworld or bust, and I'll end up as that old dude inside the bowels of the oil tanker.

Have you been accused of glibness before in your life by friends, family, or co-workers?

If you mean "compete" in a capitalist sense, then you're right. But sailing ships absolutely "compete" in that they can move goods and products from one port to another using zero fossil fuels. That's not ignoring any reality, they actually do work and sail using the wind. Open any history book for proof if you don't believe me.

But as we're already aware, relying in any way on capitalism or its definitions is going to do the exact opposite of saving us from climate change.

Perhaps we do. I meant "easily" in that the tech is already there, nothing needs to be invented. We could start building clipper ships again tomorrow, or design a clipper to hold TEUs. It's a much "easier" problem than converting all commercial lorries and personal autos to electric, across all countries, even 3rd world ones.

My guess is you're quoting this? https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The problem with your statement is fragmentation. Yes, "transportation" is the biggest single CO2 polluter followed by electricity, but there are billions of individual cars and lorries out there, across many different nations and laws, so the marginal effect of any single car is infinitesimal, and too difficult to go after. But things like maritime shipping, aviation, and railroads are monolithic, and transnationally regulated, so much easier to make an impact. Commercial transport also accounts for a way, way larger chunk of the 28% than residential transport.

In terms of most bang for buck, we should be targeting electricity generation and industry, as these are not nearly as fragmented, and easier to directly regulate and enforce regulation. If you immediately outlawed the top 100 corporations on the planet, you'd make a way bigger impact on CO2 than say, every residential house in America giving up their personal automobiles. Commercial lorries pollute far more than residential autos.

I dunno, maritime shipping producing more CO2 than California and Texas combined seems like a pretty big CO2 polluter to me, and we have to reduce where we can, ~4% is still a good start.

It actually is low hanging fruit. For 4000 years the human race engaged in maritime trade and commerce using solely wind powered vessels, and humanity thrived just fine without internal combustion engines. We could easily go back to clipper ships or design a wind-powered vessel based on shipping containers.

But efficiency will go down drastically! Transit times will increase massively! Yes, but these aren't existential threats. So people have to wait a bit longer to receive their shiny new laptops or Steam Decks, big deal. Maybe Norway won't have bananas anymore, not a big loss.

The real problem with climate change is that nobody wants to drastically inconvenience their modern lifestyle. Unfortunately, given the short window available to do something meaningful, drastic action is necessary which will result in large inconveniences and disruption for billions of people, but nobody wants that, and no politician will get elected selling that.

This figure is then misinterpreted by people who failed basic chemistry to mean that cargo ships are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, the opposite is true;

Perhaps it's just poor word choice or phrasing, but it reads like you mean that "the opposite is true" in that they are NOT a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, when in fact they are a huge contributor, more than California and Texas combined.