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Ask Slashdot: Your Favorite Subscription Services?
An anonymous reader writes: What are some subscriptions services that you are paying for and love to pay? Please include music/movie services, news outlets, software, and courses.
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In the UK Private Eye is not just entertaining but it holds to account our masters.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
That, and I pay for having a domain with email and websites. I like having that.
-- Cheers!
If you rent your house, you are funding the upkeep and property tax for the owner, plus the owner gets profit.
If you 'own' your house, sure you are still paying property tax, but you are not funding the landlord.
For example, when I rented, I spent about 12k/year to use half of one bedroom of a two bedroom townhouse.
Now I pay about 2k/year in taxes for full use of a three bedroom house in the same area (having long paid off the mortgage).
The issue is that so many people view car loans and mortgages as eternal things, and compare rent or lease payment to those loan payments and think 'well it costs the same'. I've seen this to the extreme of someone getting a new car every two years because 'well, it's not like it's any more expensive, the monthly payment is the same, why should I pay the same to drive a two year old card as a brand new car?'
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why does it matter if 'at the end' you have nothing to show for it? Have you never eaten a meal that provided flavor or nutrition above mere sustenance? Have you never attended a concert or gone to a movie? Have you never taken a vacation? All of those things leave you with 'nothing at the end to show for your expense'.
A more sane approach would be 'how much value do you get from owning vs renting'? For me, and I suspect a lot of other people, the value of an entertainment dollar comes from how much enjoyment you get from it. I can spend $10/month on a subscription movie service and watch a different movie every weekend. Or, I can spend the $10 buying a copy of a movie, watching it one weekend and spending the other three weekends diving into my collection of movies like Scrooge McDuck saying 'look how much I own!'. I would get much more enjoyment, thus value, out of the first.
As another poster said, people used to rent movies from brick-and-mortar stores. That business started dying off when the price to own a movie came down low enough. But the reason owning was seen as preferable wasn't so much 'look at all the stuff I own' as it was simple convenience. If you wanted to rent a movie you had to go to the store, hope they had a movie you wanted to see, go home and watch it, then return it to the store. By purchasing it you could watch it when you wanted, even if it was only once, and not have to deal with that hassle. That was worth money. When Netflix came out with DVD rentals that provided convenience at an even lower price than owning. Then when streaming came out it was even easier and cheaper to watch movies.
You totally missed the point of the GP. This is not about quantity at all. It doesn't matter if the government wants $2 or $2 million. If you don't pay it, they take your property and kick you out just like a landlord would. It's a perfectly appropriate analogy.
Personally, I'm not inherently opposed to property tax, though I would much rather see services paid for a different way if possible. They really NEED to codify a hard cap for property tax percentage. The part about property tax that bothers me is that they are willing to ratchet up the percentage to laughable levels. When I was a child, it would take 100+ years to pay in property taxes what the value of the property was (1%). Now we're at a level of about 30-35 years (~3%). Nobody cared when home values were rising exponentially. But now that prices have stabilized in most places, it seems absurd that the government can take an increasingly large slice of your assets, and they need to precisely because home values aren't going up, yet they need more and more revenue. At some point, owning a property becomes a liability (what if the government taxed at 10%, or 25%?). My math says we're really close to that tipping point (approximately 3.5%), where the value taken by taxes harms the value of the home more than the services they're paying for.
We need to pay for schools and roads and parks and libraries, but paying for those through property taxes makes us serfs of the state. Even though yours is $2k/year, you are still under serfdom, it's just a lighter load.