This concept has a name. Artificial Scarcity.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn't really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don't get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.
But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole "work or starve" thing isn't needed anymore.
We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it's art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.
when the rich can just live on investment income
How do you think they make that money? Primarily off of consumerism. If we all collectively decided to share what we have and stop buying what we don't need, there could be no passive income, not at the scale it exists today, anyways.
We also need to outlaw landlords. Owning land is not a job and it's certainly not a business.
Hard Agree.
Only raccoons could be owners of land :D
Consumerism is used for wealth redistribution.
Real wealth production occurs when machines create work, saving time. Work = money.
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Recommendation: the book Bullshit Jobs
Also Graeber’s Debt.
So many of Graeber’s ideas are right on the dot. Those two books helped me understand economics better than fucking Milton Friedman ever could.
I've heard of this one. Maybe I'll check it out.
The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I'm living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.
I want the inside of my house to look like the outside of an insane asylum
We haven't needed to work since the early 1900s. The labor movement was all about getting people to work less and ensuring everyone is taken care of. Consumerism was invented to fight back and has been winning ever since. People are animals and animals can be manipulated.
We all lie to ourselves in various ways - like thinking we need a supercomputer in our pocket so we can see what's trending while we sit on the toilet.
"The problem with the American economy is too many pocket computers", I say while sitting on the toilet in the Bigger Bombs factory at Raytheon.
Yeah if somebody actually said that it would be dumb, and so is pretending they did.
First, I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are some devilish details.
Take a look at some pictures of Gary, Indiana. It's an entire city that's been mostly abandoned since the collapse of the industry that built it. There are entire boarded up neighborhoods, and some quite fine large, brick houses where wealthy people used to live. It's all just sitting there. I'm sure that Gary would love to have people start moving back in, and revive the city.
So, say Gary just eminent-domained all those properties, and said to America: you want a house? All you have to do is come, pick one, and move in. You live in it for 5 years, it's your's.
The problem is that it costs money to keep up a home. Home maintenance is stupid expensive, and most of these abandoned homes need repairs: new windows, new roofs, new water heaters, plumbing repairs, electrical repairs. Do you have any idea what a new window costs? And even if it's sweat equity, and you're able to repair a roof yourself, you still need materials. Where does this money come from?
Are the homeless in California going to move to Gary, IN? Are the homeless in Alabama? There are homeless employed folks, but they're tied to their locations by their jobs. They're not moving to Gary.
Finally, it's a truism that it's often less expensive to tear down a house in poor condition and build a new one than it is to renovate. If these people don't have the money to build a new house, how are they going to afford to renovate a vacant one.
The problem is that people need jobs to live in a house (unless someone else is paying for taxes, insurance, and maintenance). And the places with jobs aren't the places like Gary, that have a abundance of empty homes. All of those empty homes are in inconvenient places, where the industry and jobs they created dried up.
It may be that a well-funded organization could artificially construct a self-sustaining community built on the bones of a dead one. But I think it's oversimplifying to suggest that you can just take an empty home away from the owner (let's assume you can) and just stick homeless people in it and assume it'll work - that, even given a house, they'll be able to afford to keep it heated, maintained, powered, insured. Shit, even if you given them a complete tax exemption, just keeping a house is expensive.
I'm sure there are some minority of homeless for whom giving an abandoned home in the area they live would solve their problems. And I'm sure that, for a while at least, having a bigger box to live in would be an improvement for many, even if the box is slowly falling apart around them. But I think it's naive to be angry about the number of empty homes, and that homelessness could be solved by relocating the homeless to where these places are and assigning them a house - whatever state it's in.
The problem is that people need jobs to live
QFT
Don't get me started on that one.
We don't need to move them, there are vacant homes everywhere. Even in San francisco the residential vacancy rate is 6%. The unhoused in San francisco make up about 1% of the population, so assuming the unhoused population takes up the same amount of housing per person as the housed population, we could house every unhoused person here and still have 5% left over.
That's the worst case too, the rest of the country has a higher vacancy rate and a proportionally lower unhoused population.
so, the biggest reasons why the california unhoused population is so big are because social workers from the rest of the country send their high needs people our way. it's called 'greyhound therapy'-california is warm enough you won't freeze in winter, nobody thinks about heat stroke, and a bus ticket is better than a month of shelter beds. we also get all the children they throw away for being queer, at least the ones who don't just join the military, which isn't going to be a thing anymore, for pretty similar reasons.
so the opposite of that actually happens. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like to go home.
except... even in los angeles, there are so many empty units. I don't just mean for turnover-the half dozen or so big landlording companies make more money keeping a unit empty and recursively leveraging it like tesla stock than renting it out to a tenant with good income and dubious credit. so we are being stared at by a thousand blind windows at all times. many of them in large buildings that are partially occupied, and even the single family residences are well maintained, because they exist as financial instruments. I doubt it's enough, but not everybody actually wants to live in los angeles-the food is great, the culture is good, I adore the mild winters, and so much else, but the hills, the traffic, the ground constantly shaking, the noise, the fact one of our seasons is just 'fire' and the smoke sometimes drops the temperature by a degree or two so it's not even a net negative every time, the amount of funding we give to the gangs, and the fact it's just so fucking big and so fucking city just isn't for everyone. I'm sure there are people who miss snow.
the concept is more sound than you would think, and it's not like there's any down side.
called 'greyhound therapy'-california is warm enough you won't freeze in winter,
I live in Minneapolis, where we regularly have winter days that reach -30°F. Not frequently that bad, but rarely a winter without one of those, and in the past 7 years I've lived here, we've had a couple of days where it's hit -50°. You don't survive that very long, even with a lot of good clothes; any exposed skin gets frostbite within minutes. It's not been as bad the past couple of years, what with global warming, but the winters here can well be described as "brutal." I can't imagine being homeless here, and if I was, and someone offered me a free trip to California, I'd take it. I grew up in Santa Cruz, and while LA is rather hotter than I prefer, I'd still rather face that than a Minnesota winter.
We have family in Dana Point. Everything around there is stupid expensive. I don't know about LA housing prices, but I haven't heard it's cheap. And you still have to maintain, if you own, especially in apartments, where your problems can trivially become your neighbors', too.
To compound matters, the US is currently moving all the new manufacturing jobs into southern red states, which will be interesting. Red staters are pissed because they are experiencing major cost of living adjustments, particularly in housing prices. Which is partly why they voted maga.
Shout-out to too good to go - an app that aims to minimize food waste by letting restaurants and grocery stores sell "surprise bags" of food at 1/3 to 1/2 off!
Good mythical morning has a few episodes featuring these!
My colleague brought us doughnuts from here today. She got them last night but they were still plenty fresh.
We don't have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
Resources are constantly being wasted to accelerate the wealth transfer up the chain.
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Lots of less expensive housing in the suburbs and country, go live in them. The reduced noise and air pollution is great.
Yea not in cali
A house in the suburb for both norcal and socal is about 1.5m, unless you're looking at the ghetto
Hell even washington is like 1m ish for a house in the suburb
Crazy to talk about "cheap housing" and look to the suburbs in the year 2025. That ship sailed decades ago.
That's before you start pricing in the time-value of an hour or more a workday trapped in traffic.
Air pollution can be just as bad if you live near big farms in a poorly regulated air quality state.
Also you'll socially rot.
That's capitalism baybe. The expectation of infinite growth in a finite system based around the infinite sales of infinite products that have a price because they say they are finite.
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And people think it's the fault of the poor that they don't have enough :)
We also dont have enough water, living on a enormous water planet. :)
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