I was just thinking about something similar to this earlier.
Geordi LaForge was included in Star Trek: The Next Generation as the token disabled character, so that disabled people would get representation in the inclusive vision of the future that show painted -- similar to how the Original Series depicted a Russian, a (nonspecific) Asian, and a black woman, all serving on the bridge in a show targeted at a predominantly white male American culture, to show how different nationalities, races, and sexes could all work together in harmony in the future.
But in an idealistic utopian future like Trek presents, shouldn't all disabilities be cured? Disability isn't some harmless difference like race or sex or nationality or whatever that we want to show all integrated and coexisting in the future. Showing a future where somehow all blacks had become white, all women had become men, and so on, would be ridiculous and dystopian. But showing a world where all disabled people were as able as anyone else... isn't that what we're aiming for? Isn't that the point of medicine?
Why isn't there a token poor character on the bridge of the Enterprise? Every series depicts nothing but well-to-do people with all their material needs met, pursuing science and such for the intrinsic fulfillment of those activities -- nobody's struggling just to make ends meet, like many people do in real life. Sound the cries of "class discrimination!" then, shall we? Against the erasure of the lower classes?
No, that would be stupid. The reason there's no poor people serving on the bridge of the Enterprise is because in Star Trek's utopian future, poverty has been eliminated. Why is disability any different? Why does it show a somehow better future to have a token disabled character, but not a token poor character?
Mental issues are different from physical ones. I can't rightly comprehend how someone who is physically unable to do something that other people can do (like see or hear) could consider that something worth preserving, but there are large communities of people with autism spectrum "disorders" who consider the way that they think and feel to be not less capable than how other people think or feel, but just different.
It's more akin to if society said raw strength was the standard of physical ability, and agility or stamina were neat bonuses to that, but not really important; and then there were other people who were weak by the social standard but had their own physical talents less-valued by that standard, elegant dancers or endurance runners in a world where only power lifters were valued, who refuse to accept that their body's different kind of physical ability is a "disability". (We've actually got something akin to that in body-image discrimination: different healthy body types are usually adept at different kinds of physical activity, but we tend to call e.g. the stocky guy who can lift a car or walk for many miles without even tiring "fat", because he doesn't have a lean body built for running and jumping that we think of as "fit").
In the end, if someone doesn't suffer intrinsically from a trait (thus excluding suffering due only to society's reactions to that trait), then the trait shouldn't count as a "disability" or an "illness".
And whether it does or not, the person with that trait is still a person deserving of the same respect either way.
People like you are what break every kind of socioeconomic system yet devised. "I had it tough and got fucked over but some day I'll be the one fucking everyone over so it all works out in the end!" -- except for everyone scrupulous enough not to buy into the fuck-other-people-over contest, and all the innocent bystanders getting fucked over in the crossfire.
I don't quite see an argument in all of that, but your overall point seems to be that you can better yourself and learn and work hard and move up the socioeconomic ladder and that's how it should be. I agree completely that that's how it should be; what I have been arguing is that rent counteracts that, makes it so it's not enough like that; it lets some people float up effortlessly on the work of others, and conversely puts a great weight on others making their climb up inordinately difficult.
We wouldn't let some people make a living outright stealing from others, and excuse it by saying "well if you're clever and good at fighting or hiding or otherwise avoiding getting robbed, you can become a robber yourself!" We recognize that we need to provide a fair arena for the competition, providing equal opportunities for everyone. I'm saying that rent allows for an unacknowledged equality of opportunity.
It's like if in a race, getting closer to the front gave you a speed boost, and getting further behind gave you a slowdown. I'm not arguing that anyone up front should be held back so that people in the back can catch up to them. I'm arguing that nobody should get speed boosts or slowdowns based on their current race position. It should not be possible to get to a point where you can just coast along on your speed boost and stay in the lead forever; you could coast for a while without falling behind because you're already so far ahead, but that should come at the cost of your leading distance. If the guy in back is running at all harder than the guy in front, their respective speeds should reflect that, and he should eventually catch up. As is, it's much easier to maintain your position near the lead than it is just to keep from falling further behind near the back, and I've identified rent (including especially rent on money, i.e. interest) as the culprit behind that problem.
As to your comments on my personal situation: a mobile home is a home yeah, but so is an apartment; the point is I'm still paying someone else for the privilege of living somewhere. Renting it out, if it was even legal on the land lease (hey we're back on topic again), would just let me break even. When I move on I plan on letting my disabled mother and possibly grandmother (if she's still around) live here, rather than renting rooms in other people's homes.
And I have no debt, and have never had debt (I do put everything on credit, but pay it off before any interest is ever due), so "learn about debt management" is not exactly helpful advice. I don't need advice on how to do better myself. I am doing well. I am doing better than any of my peers. I'm not complaining that poor me has life so bad. I'm complaining that I, and the majority of Americans doing less well than I am, face unfair challenges in doing better than we are, largely to the benefit of those who least need such benefit.
It's not a shortened form of "neither", but that makes your use of "and nor" nonsensical. "Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.
TL;DR: Say "and neither should it be" or "nor should it be", but not "and nor should it be".
Right, because original thought equals "LOL masturbation". I think we know who the real 12 year old here is. But my apologies -- that comparison is an insult to quite a number of 12 year olds, many of whom are actually quite good at innovative thinking, not having had it beaten out of them by asshats like you yet. But give it time and continued emotional abuse and I'm sure most of them will come down to your level eventually, sad to say.
Yeah, and I stand by that. Where is anything crumbling? You really don't know how to make or even understand a logical argument, do you?
You asked where does a rentless world leave you if you want to go kayaking on the way home. I gave an answer as to how you can do that without rent, with only buying and selling.
My worldview is fine. You're just unable to imagine things from any worldview other than your own. "Oh noes, but if we didn't do everything exactly the way we do it now, everything would crumble!" No. The good things existing now that are currently constructed in terms of rent can still be preserved without rent, and I explained how. The bad things that rent causes meanwhile could be escaped if we abolished it -- and kept all of those good things in the ways I have just explained to you several times over.
You've yet to pose any problem for my proposition, and in fact I gave the solution to the problem you tried to pose in the post you replied to. You're evidently just too thick to comprehend the plain words in front of your face.
Yeah sure, a 12 year old with a philosophy degree, who throws around terms like "rentier" and rigorously constructs possible alternate economic structures in an attempt to synthesize an original solution to the still-unresolved antithesis between capitalist and socialist ideologies. Sure thing bucko.
You started in with the invectives. If you don't like it then shove your closed-minded unsympathetic head up your ass and eat shit you miserable fucktard.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here, but at least you sound polite unlike half the other people in this thread.
It sounds like you're telling me to live cheaply and save and I'll eventually be a homeowner. Good advice, but beside the point. I'm now making twice the median personal income and still live barely less thriftily than I did as a college student. All of that excess income, nearly half of what I take home -- that is, nearly an entire median take-home income -- is now going towards savings. You're right, I will be a homeowner some day. (By some standards I technically am already. I now own mobile home, but I still have to rent the land it's on, which costs as much as apartment rent would, and that's what really counts -- I'm still stuck paying rent in the end, and a whole extended family is living a work-free life of leisure off of nothing but the rents collected from the poor people stuck in this trailer park with me).
All of that is beside the point. Yes, I am beating the system. It is possible. But I am also way above the median on every measure of intellectual ability I've ever taken, and my income is finally starting to reflect that, and still it is a colossal uphill battle even for me. What about the over half of Americans who make less than half of what I do, and don't have the ability to ever do much better than that -- whose children probably won't either, and so on. Should generation after generation after generation, an entire class of people, be stuck working to paying for the leisurely life of those who were by some means or another fortunate enough to get the upper hand on them, without ever working their way out of it even over generations of struggling to do so? It's virtually indentured servitude, except you get to pick who you are indentured to -- but in the end you have to pick someone, because you have to live somewhere.
You fuck off you parasitic sack of shit rentier. Or so I presume -- why else would you defend a practice robbing millions of people of a huge chunk of their hard-earned wealth generation after generation if you weren't benefitting from it? Work for your own damn living like a decent human being you pathetic fucking leech.
You are the one who brought up kayaks, as though my idea -- which is meant to solve real problems real people are really suffering from -- was unworkable because it would somehow impede your ability to get a kayak for short-term use for a reasonable amount of money. I'm just pointing out that that is completely possible to do without having to technically rent. Why the hell would you buy a kayak on the spur of the moment? The fuck if I know, you're the one who suddenly wanted a kayak on the ride home. I'm just pointing out that you could still get one, use it briefly, get rid of it, and pay the same amount of money in the same time frame as you would have renting it, without having to have the legal instrument of a rental contract involved. That's all possible using only sales.
As for put my money where my mouth is, sure thing. If I am ever in a position where I have property I'm not using that I want to make some money off of, I'll sell it instead of renting it out. No problem, I was already planning on it. As for implementing my ideas in the real world beyond that... I don't have the power to abolish the legal instrument of rental contracts all by myself. You might as well have told an abolitionist "put your money where your mouth is" -- ok, he doesn't own slaves, but there's still this big problem of all the other people who do, what more do you want him to do about it? All I can do is convince other people it would be a good idea to get rid of rent, and then maybe eventually enough people who share that opinion will actually be in a position to do something about it.
It's exactly the same as renting a kayak would be, except if for some crazy reason you needed a kayak permanently (and immediately) and couldn't afford one, it would enable you to buy one instead of being stuck renting one. Which isn't very important for kayaks, which is why kayaks "rentals" (and similar places where "rent" is genuinely useful for temporary use of things) would be essentially unchanged, aside from the legal wording of the agreement. But for places that kind of situation is important, like housing, a major problem for large numbers of people would be solved. But you apparently don't give a fuck about them, so long as the wording of your kayak-"lease" doesn't change, right?
Please keep your own stupidity to yourself in real life, thanks.
There is no law of nature necessitating those transaction costs and inefficiencies. We invented those as part of our economic customs, and with enough pressure to do so, we would get rid of them. If there was a demand for high-turnover sales to replace rentals, that would generate that kind of pressure, and we would find a way to streamline the process. We buy and sell almost everything else with much greater efficiency; it's ridiculous that we make a special exception for housing, and the only reason it survives is because people are spending already-gargantuan amounts of money that they won't have to pay off for decades. With a short turnaround time between purchase and sale, and a high volume of those, the price would 'hurt' a lot more, and wouldn't be tolerated nearly as readily.
It won't pay for itself. Your renters will pay for it for you. You are funding your retirement off the work of others; people like me, who have lost tens of thousands of dollars they would have rather put toward buying something for themselves, but instead had to throw down a hole to pay someone else's mortgage just because we couldn't save enough to get our own mortgage because everything we would have saved had to go to rent. You are the asshole, so go fuck your own self.
And if I had had parents with a fucking basement to live in, then maybe I could have lived rent-free long enough to save for a down payment and wouldn't be stuck beholden to parasitic shits like you who think the poor owe you a living just because you had enough money to buy yourself leverage against them. As it was I got thrown out of the tool shed I grew up in and have had to claw my way up from nothing against that kind of leverage my entire life. Take your fucking silver spoon and shove it up your ass you exploitative waste of oxygen.
The expenses that come with buying and selling are one of the things that would be forced away if everyone who rents was technically buying instead. If you only want the place for a year, you should be able to get it for a year in about the same fashion as you do now, except you can get the money you spent on it back at the cost of a slight inconvenience if you like.
And if all the poor people who are renting in the city live out in the outskirts, what's going to happen to all that property in the city, that is no longer profitable for the rich people to own, because they can't generate a rental income from it? They'll have to sell it to get any benefit from it... and the only people looking to buy are the people who were renting from them previously, people who want to live there, since there's no point in buying it unless you want to live in it as it's useless as an investment without rent. (In other words, abolishing rent reduces the demand from the wealthy down to the level of what they need for their own use, as it makes home ownership of no benefit aside from as a place to live, as it should be). So they'll have to sell it on terms that the people who would have otherwise rented it can afford, which means rent-like terms... just ones that eventually come to an end, and ones that allow the "renters" to recover their costs if they do the "landlords" work of keeping the place in good shape and finding a replacement "renter" when they move.
It just changes "rent" from "you can live here as long as I feel like it, for infinite monthly installments of $X/mo" to "you can live here as long as you feel like it, for [some finite number of] monthly installments of $X/mo".
You buy a kayak from the same place you'd otherwise have rented one, pay your first installment on it equivalent to the rent you would have paid on it, then sell it back to the same vendor for slightly less than you bought it for, canceling out what you still owe on the sale, and go home. I explained this already. Why can nobody ever read when I answer their questions before they ask them?
I've yet to hear a solid argument against my proposition other than blanket dismissal that there is any problem needing to be solved (in which case I care as little about convincing you as I care to convince the Phelps family that God doesn't exist -- you're a lost cause). Care to give it a try would you rather continue dismissing every unconventional thought as prima facie crazy?
Then buy them and sell them back when you're done.
If you want the convenience of not putting a lot of money down up front and not having to find someone to buy them off you later, then buy them on longer terms (i.e. slower payment, less up front) for higher prices, and then sell them back on shorter terms (i.e. immediate payment) for lower prices, and lose some money in the deal for the convenience. That's what the rent you're paying for them is worth, right? The convenience? So someone should be able to make a living selling high and slow and buying back fast and low for the convenience that that kind of market provides for the temporary use of things, and that should fetch about the same prices as a rental business would because it's serving the same function.
But if you should find yourself needing something immediately and permanently and being priced out of buying and then unable to save to buy because you're stuck renting it -- like the housing situation for many people -- then you can just keep paying the "rent" until you own it outright, or take your time to find someone else to sell to one the same terms you're buying for and eventually get back the money you've been putting into it (to put toward finishing off your purchase of it's replacement). Instead of being stuck forever paying and paying and paying and paying and paying and paying and never ending up with a single cent's worth of property to your name for all that money spent -- meanwhile someone has made bank off of you over your entire life and still has all the property you "paid for" to continue profiting from indefinitely.
"Moral rights" in this context are a badly-named subset of authors' rights, juxtaposed against "economic rights" which are the more familiar copyright laws we know here in America. Blame the French for the confusing terminology.
I'd be curious to see that disproof if you've got a link.
(I am of the opinion that the causal origins of homosexuality are entirely irrelevant to any political debate on the matter, and that it's rather bizarre when you think about it for supporters of it to resort to what amounts to "they can't help themselves!" as a defense of something that shouldn't need defending since it harms nobody).
We made a constitution, and by doing so, in that same act, deserved it.
If we are not unmaking it, then by that same act we no longer deserve it.
"We" as a nation, that is. We each, as individuals, deserve to be part of a nation that would make (and in doing so deserve) and defend such a constitution.
Those of us who would support the making and defending of it, at least.
There are actually Wikipedia policies to address exactly the kind of example problem you give here, such as the Undue Weight policy. Just because an assertion is verifiable doesn't automatically warrant its inclusion in an article, if including it would bias the article in some way, by making the verifiable assertion seem more important or significant than it actually is, which is what is happening in your example.
Another such policy is the one on Synthesis. You can't take a bunch of verifiable assertions and string them together into an argument or narrative to make an original point of your own. E.g. "An A is anything which is B and C.[1] x is B[2]. x is also C[3]. Therefore x is an A." That would be synthesis and thus prohibited, even though the first three statements are all reliably sourced and the last is a simple, uncontroversial logical inference from them. Someone else has to have strung those assertions together in that way in a reliable primary or secondary source. Even if you left off the conclusion, the second and third sentences would still likely be undue weight in an article about As, unless some reliable source had notably talked about x and whether or not it is an A.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just thinking about something similar to this earlier.
Geordi LaForge was included in Star Trek: The Next Generation as the token disabled character, so that disabled people would get representation in the inclusive vision of the future that show painted -- similar to how the Original Series depicted a Russian, a (nonspecific) Asian, and a black woman, all serving on the bridge in a show targeted at a predominantly white male American culture, to show how different nationalities, races, and sexes could all work together in harmony in the future.
But in an idealistic utopian future like Trek presents, shouldn't all disabilities be cured? Disability isn't some harmless difference like race or sex or nationality or whatever that we want to show all integrated and coexisting in the future. Showing a future where somehow all blacks had become white, all women had become men, and so on, would be ridiculous and dystopian. But showing a world where all disabled people were as able as anyone else... isn't that what we're aiming for? Isn't that the point of medicine?
Why isn't there a token poor character on the bridge of the Enterprise? Every series depicts nothing but well-to-do people with all their material needs met, pursuing science and such for the intrinsic fulfillment of those activities -- nobody's struggling just to make ends meet, like many people do in real life. Sound the cries of "class discrimination!" then, shall we? Against the erasure of the lower classes?
No, that would be stupid. The reason there's no poor people serving on the bridge of the Enterprise is because in Star Trek's utopian future, poverty has been eliminated. Why is disability any different? Why does it show a somehow better future to have a token disabled character, but not a token poor character?
Mental issues are different from physical ones. I can't rightly comprehend how someone who is physically unable to do something that other people can do (like see or hear) could consider that something worth preserving, but there are large communities of people with autism spectrum "disorders" who consider the way that they think and feel to be not less capable than how other people think or feel, but just different.
It's more akin to if society said raw strength was the standard of physical ability, and agility or stamina were neat bonuses to that, but not really important; and then there were other people who were weak by the social standard but had their own physical talents less-valued by that standard, elegant dancers or endurance runners in a world where only power lifters were valued, who refuse to accept that their body's different kind of physical ability is a "disability". (We've actually got something akin to that in body-image discrimination: different healthy body types are usually adept at different kinds of physical activity, but we tend to call e.g. the stocky guy who can lift a car or walk for many miles without even tiring "fat", because he doesn't have a lean body built for running and jumping that we think of as "fit").
In the end, if someone doesn't suffer intrinsically from a trait (thus excluding suffering due only to society's reactions to that trait), then the trait shouldn't count as a "disability" or an "illness".
And whether it does or not, the person with that trait is still a person deserving of the same respect either way.
People like you are what break every kind of socioeconomic system yet devised. "I had it tough and got fucked over but some day I'll be the one fucking everyone over so it all works out in the end!" -- except for everyone scrupulous enough not to buy into the fuck-other-people-over contest, and all the innocent bystanders getting fucked over in the crossfire.
I don't quite see an argument in all of that, but your overall point seems to be that you can better yourself and learn and work hard and move up the socioeconomic ladder and that's how it should be. I agree completely that that's how it should be; what I have been arguing is that rent counteracts that, makes it so it's not enough like that; it lets some people float up effortlessly on the work of others, and conversely puts a great weight on others making their climb up inordinately difficult.
We wouldn't let some people make a living outright stealing from others, and excuse it by saying "well if you're clever and good at fighting or hiding or otherwise avoiding getting robbed, you can become a robber yourself!" We recognize that we need to provide a fair arena for the competition, providing equal opportunities for everyone. I'm saying that rent allows for an unacknowledged equality of opportunity.
It's like if in a race, getting closer to the front gave you a speed boost, and getting further behind gave you a slowdown. I'm not arguing that anyone up front should be held back so that people in the back can catch up to them. I'm arguing that nobody should get speed boosts or slowdowns based on their current race position. It should not be possible to get to a point where you can just coast along on your speed boost and stay in the lead forever; you could coast for a while without falling behind because you're already so far ahead, but that should come at the cost of your leading distance. If the guy in back is running at all harder than the guy in front, their respective speeds should reflect that, and he should eventually catch up. As is, it's much easier to maintain your position near the lead than it is just to keep from falling further behind near the back, and I've identified rent (including especially rent on money, i.e. interest) as the culprit behind that problem.
As to your comments on my personal situation: a mobile home is a home yeah, but so is an apartment; the point is I'm still paying someone else for the privilege of living somewhere. Renting it out, if it was even legal on the land lease (hey we're back on topic again), would just let me break even. When I move on I plan on letting my disabled mother and possibly grandmother (if she's still around) live here, rather than renting rooms in other people's homes.
And I have no debt, and have never had debt (I do put everything on credit, but pay it off before any interest is ever due), so "learn about debt management" is not exactly helpful advice. I don't need advice on how to do better myself. I am doing well. I am doing better than any of my peers. I'm not complaining that poor me has life so bad. I'm complaining that I, and the majority of Americans doing less well than I am, face unfair challenges in doing better than we are, largely to the benefit of those who least need such benefit.
It's not a shortened form of "neither", but that makes your use of "and nor" nonsensical. "Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.
TL;DR: Say "and neither should it be" or "nor should it be", but not "and nor should it be".
Right, because original thought equals "LOL masturbation". I think we know who the real 12 year old here is. But my apologies -- that comparison is an insult to quite a number of 12 year olds, many of whom are actually quite good at innovative thinking, not having had it beaten out of them by asshats like you yet. But give it time and continued emotional abuse and I'm sure most of them will come down to your level eventually, sad to say.
Yeah, and I stand by that. Where is anything crumbling? You really don't know how to make or even understand a logical argument, do you?
You asked where does a rentless world leave you if you want to go kayaking on the way home. I gave an answer as to how you can do that without rent, with only buying and selling.
My worldview is fine. You're just unable to imagine things from any worldview other than your own. "Oh noes, but if we didn't do everything exactly the way we do it now, everything would crumble!" No. The good things existing now that are currently constructed in terms of rent can still be preserved without rent, and I explained how. The bad things that rent causes meanwhile could be escaped if we abolished it -- and kept all of those good things in the ways I have just explained to you several times over.
You've yet to pose any problem for my proposition, and in fact I gave the solution to the problem you tried to pose in the post you replied to. You're evidently just too thick to comprehend the plain words in front of your face.
Yeah sure, a 12 year old with a philosophy degree, who throws around terms like "rentier" and rigorously constructs possible alternate economic structures in an attempt to synthesize an original solution to the still-unresolved antithesis between capitalist and socialist ideologies. Sure thing bucko.
You started in with the invectives. If you don't like it then shove your closed-minded unsympathetic head up your ass and eat shit you miserable fucktard.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here, but at least you sound polite unlike half the other people in this thread.
It sounds like you're telling me to live cheaply and save and I'll eventually be a homeowner. Good advice, but beside the point. I'm now making twice the median personal income and still live barely less thriftily than I did as a college student. All of that excess income, nearly half of what I take home -- that is, nearly an entire median take-home income -- is now going towards savings. You're right, I will be a homeowner some day. (By some standards I technically am already. I now own mobile home, but I still have to rent the land it's on, which costs as much as apartment rent would, and that's what really counts -- I'm still stuck paying rent in the end, and a whole extended family is living a work-free life of leisure off of nothing but the rents collected from the poor people stuck in this trailer park with me).
All of that is beside the point. Yes, I am beating the system. It is possible. But I am also way above the median on every measure of intellectual ability I've ever taken, and my income is finally starting to reflect that, and still it is a colossal uphill battle even for me. What about the over half of Americans who make less than half of what I do, and don't have the ability to ever do much better than that -- whose children probably won't either, and so on. Should generation after generation after generation, an entire class of people, be stuck working to paying for the leisurely life of those who were by some means or another fortunate enough to get the upper hand on them, without ever working their way out of it even over generations of struggling to do so? It's virtually indentured servitude, except you get to pick who you are indentured to -- but in the end you have to pick someone, because you have to live somewhere.
You fuck off you parasitic sack of shit rentier. Or so I presume -- why else would you defend a practice robbing millions of people of a huge chunk of their hard-earned wealth generation after generation if you weren't benefitting from it? Work for your own damn living like a decent human being you pathetic fucking leech.
You are the one who brought up kayaks, as though my idea -- which is meant to solve real problems real people are really suffering from -- was unworkable because it would somehow impede your ability to get a kayak for short-term use for a reasonable amount of money. I'm just pointing out that that is completely possible to do without having to technically rent. Why the hell would you buy a kayak on the spur of the moment? The fuck if I know, you're the one who suddenly wanted a kayak on the ride home. I'm just pointing out that you could still get one, use it briefly, get rid of it, and pay the same amount of money in the same time frame as you would have renting it, without having to have the legal instrument of a rental contract involved. That's all possible using only sales.
As for put my money where my mouth is, sure thing. If I am ever in a position where I have property I'm not using that I want to make some money off of, I'll sell it instead of renting it out. No problem, I was already planning on it. As for implementing my ideas in the real world beyond that... I don't have the power to abolish the legal instrument of rental contracts all by myself. You might as well have told an abolitionist "put your money where your mouth is" -- ok, he doesn't own slaves, but there's still this big problem of all the other people who do, what more do you want him to do about it? All I can do is convince other people it would be a good idea to get rid of rent, and then maybe eventually enough people who share that opinion will actually be in a position to do something about it.
It's exactly the same as renting a kayak would be, except if for some crazy reason you needed a kayak permanently (and immediately) and couldn't afford one, it would enable you to buy one instead of being stuck renting one. Which isn't very important for kayaks, which is why kayaks "rentals" (and similar places where "rent" is genuinely useful for temporary use of things) would be essentially unchanged, aside from the legal wording of the agreement. But for places that kind of situation is important, like housing, a major problem for large numbers of people would be solved. But you apparently don't give a fuck about them, so long as the wording of your kayak-"lease" doesn't change, right?
Please keep your own stupidity to yourself in real life, thanks.
There is no law of nature necessitating those transaction costs and inefficiencies. We invented those as part of our economic customs, and with enough pressure to do so, we would get rid of them. If there was a demand for high-turnover sales to replace rentals, that would generate that kind of pressure, and we would find a way to streamline the process. We buy and sell almost everything else with much greater efficiency; it's ridiculous that we make a special exception for housing, and the only reason it survives is because people are spending already-gargantuan amounts of money that they won't have to pay off for decades. With a short turnaround time between purchase and sale, and a high volume of those, the price would 'hurt' a lot more, and wouldn't be tolerated nearly as readily.
It won't pay for itself. Your renters will pay for it for you. You are funding your retirement off the work of others; people like me, who have lost tens of thousands of dollars they would have rather put toward buying something for themselves, but instead had to throw down a hole to pay someone else's mortgage just because we couldn't save enough to get our own mortgage because everything we would have saved had to go to rent. You are the asshole, so go fuck your own self.
And if I had had parents with a fucking basement to live in, then maybe I could have lived rent-free long enough to save for a down payment and wouldn't be stuck beholden to parasitic shits like you who think the poor owe you a living just because you had enough money to buy yourself leverage against them. As it was I got thrown out of the tool shed I grew up in and have had to claw my way up from nothing against that kind of leverage my entire life. Take your fucking silver spoon and shove it up your ass you exploitative waste of oxygen.
The expenses that come with buying and selling are one of the things that would be forced away if everyone who rents was technically buying instead. If you only want the place for a year, you should be able to get it for a year in about the same fashion as you do now, except you can get the money you spent on it back at the cost of a slight inconvenience if you like.
And if all the poor people who are renting in the city live out in the outskirts, what's going to happen to all that property in the city, that is no longer profitable for the rich people to own, because they can't generate a rental income from it? They'll have to sell it to get any benefit from it... and the only people looking to buy are the people who were renting from them previously, people who want to live there, since there's no point in buying it unless you want to live in it as it's useless as an investment without rent. (In other words, abolishing rent reduces the demand from the wealthy down to the level of what they need for their own use, as it makes home ownership of no benefit aside from as a place to live, as it should be). So they'll have to sell it on terms that the people who would have otherwise rented it can afford, which means rent-like terms... just ones that eventually come to an end, and ones that allow the "renters" to recover their costs if they do the "landlords" work of keeping the place in good shape and finding a replacement "renter" when they move.
It just changes "rent" from "you can live here as long as I feel like it, for infinite monthly installments of $X/mo" to "you can live here as long as you feel like it, for [some finite number of] monthly installments of $X/mo".
You buy a kayak from the same place you'd otherwise have rented one, pay your first installment on it equivalent to the rent you would have paid on it, then sell it back to the same vendor for slightly less than you bought it for, canceling out what you still owe on the sale, and go home. I explained this already. Why can nobody ever read when I answer their questions before they ask them?
I've yet to hear a solid argument against my proposition other than blanket dismissal that there is any problem needing to be solved (in which case I care as little about convincing you as I care to convince the Phelps family that God doesn't exist -- you're a lost cause). Care to give it a try would you rather continue dismissing every unconventional thought as prima facie crazy?
Then buy them and sell them back when you're done.
If you want the convenience of not putting a lot of money down up front and not having to find someone to buy them off you later, then buy them on longer terms (i.e. slower payment, less up front) for higher prices, and then sell them back on shorter terms (i.e. immediate payment) for lower prices, and lose some money in the deal for the convenience. That's what the rent you're paying for them is worth, right? The convenience? So someone should be able to make a living selling high and slow and buying back fast and low for the convenience that that kind of market provides for the temporary use of things, and that should fetch about the same prices as a rental business would because it's serving the same function.
But if you should find yourself needing something immediately and permanently and being priced out of buying and then unable to save to buy because you're stuck renting it -- like the housing situation for many people -- then you can just keep paying the "rent" until you own it outright, or take your time to find someone else to sell to one the same terms you're buying for and eventually get back the money you've been putting into it (to put toward finishing off your purchase of it's replacement). Instead of being stuck forever paying and paying and paying and paying and paying and paying and never ending up with a single cent's worth of property to your name for all that money spent -- meanwhile someone has made bank off of you over your entire life and still has all the property you "paid for" to continue profiting from indefinitely.
All rent is predatory.
If you want money for property you're not using, sell it.
"Moral rights" in this context are a badly-named subset of authors' rights, juxtaposed against "economic rights" which are the more familiar copyright laws we know here in America. Blame the French for the confusing terminology.
I'd be curious to see that disproof if you've got a link.
(I am of the opinion that the causal origins of homosexuality are entirely irrelevant to any political debate on the matter, and that it's rather bizarre when you think about it for supporters of it to resort to what amounts to "they can't help themselves!" as a defense of something that shouldn't need defending since it harms nobody).
I don't think that was a typo.
*if we are now unmaking it... damn typos
We, as a nation, were not given a constitution.
We made a constitution, and by doing so, in that same act, deserved it.
If we are not unmaking it, then by that same act we no longer deserve it.
"We" as a nation, that is. We each, as individuals, deserve to be part of a nation that would make (and in doing so deserve) and defend such a constitution.
Those of us who would support the making and defending of it, at least.
There are actually Wikipedia policies to address exactly the kind of example problem you give here, such as the Undue Weight policy. Just because an assertion is verifiable doesn't automatically warrant its inclusion in an article, if including it would bias the article in some way, by making the verifiable assertion seem more important or significant than it actually is, which is what is happening in your example.
Another such policy is the one on Synthesis. You can't take a bunch of verifiable assertions and string them together into an argument or narrative to make an original point of your own. E.g. "An A is anything which is B and C.[1] x is B[2]. x is also C[3]. Therefore x is an A." That would be synthesis and thus prohibited, even though the first three statements are all reliably sourced and the last is a simple, uncontroversial logical inference from them. Someone else has to have strung those assertions together in that way in a reliable primary or secondary source. Even if you left off the conclusion, the second and third sentences would still likely be undue weight in an article about As, unless some reliable source had notably talked about x and whether or not it is an A.