I am all for holding them accountable.

Obviously there has to be an incentive for Jim-bob to tie up his retirement savings and credit worthiness in a house that he doesn’t live in. You may not like the fact that people have to qualify for bank loans to buy property, but this is the world we live in. Especially if you happen to be an undocumented immigrant.

Oh, your anecdotal evidence about your parent’s home surely beats my Nobel-prize winning economics study citation. Lucky for your parents they didn’t have to sell it in 2010. Because I have anecdotal evidence for someone who bought a house for $400k in 2004 and then later sold it for $280k after the real estate crash.

Also the increasing property value you mention is due to regulatory capture by home owners who prevent the construction of new rental properties for fear it will “hurt their home value.” Combined with a mass exodus out of the rural areas into urban areas that are not building homes or city infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the increase in residents in the short run, which results in increased prices for homes in the city until those issues are addressed.

None of these things are “working as intended.”

No, you get different scam calls which you assume are the same but are definitely not, since these ones just go out to names on lists of property owners, not random residents.

Janitors are only employed in large, expensive apartment buildings. Single family homes don’t use them, nor do cheaper apartments. So that’s not really descriptive of a landlords job at all.

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

• The tenants are able to live in a house that they can’t afford to buy because they don’t have credit and credentials that satisfy the bank.
• The tenants are able to move out with a couple months notice if they get a job elsewhere. They don’t have to worry about selling the house or finding a way to pay double mortgages when they move elsewhere… Or, worse, taint their souls by renting out their extra house while waiting for the housing market to improve.
• The tenants money is not tied up in a property, they are able to invest it in the stock market which has a higher rate of return than home ownership (which only keeps pace with inflation on average, per Case Schiller).
• The tenants don’t have to worry about having money or credit reserved to cover unexpected costs, like the new water heater breaking a year after it was installed.
• The tenants don’t get constant calls from scammers claiming they want to py your property for CASH TODAY.

Just a few thoughts.

You could just buy a house.

Why don’t you buy a condo?

If the landlord is too cheap to hire enough staff for his company, then he has multiple jobs.

Like a small business?

It really depends on the landlord. I’ve had landlords who did some repairs.

Most people treat it as passive income they spend less than 14.4 hours per week on it, which means the IRS categorizes it as passive income.

I worked in a grocery store, a bar, a coffee shop, a restaurant and a big retail store, so yeah — I’ve “maintained” a property before.

In what position? Did you fix the refrigerator when it broke down? Or did you call a repair company? Did you choose the repair company, or call a pre-approved company? How many quotes did you get before hiring the repair men? Was it prepay, or post pay billing or what? Did you handle licensing and permits and annual inspections? Did you fix the plumbing when it broke? Did you manage the building leases and speak with the property owners? Did you create a budget for repairing? What kind of depreciation schedule did you use? What did you do when the pipes froze?

Janitors are cleaners. Typically the people who maintain apartments are called maintenance workers, handymen, or (old fashioned) superintendent. Sometimes property manager, if they also handle renting it out.

A photographic memory means you can recall a perfect visual image in your mind of a past event and examine it for details as if it were a picture. So, for example, if you are trying to remember a book quote, you’d bring up a visualization of the page of the book that you read and read the words on the page again.

I’m officially sick of this so-called AI. There’s nothing intelligent about it, it’s simply functionality modifying programs spewing recursive bullshit written by other AIs (or possibly by itself) that were all trained on stolen human work once upon a time, but are now just gibberish.

I didn’t hit one.

This is gross on every level.

It’s not weird at all. China invented tea (Camellia sinensis). The cultivation techniques, the drying and fermenting, and the brewing techniques for various types of black, white, green, and oolong tea. They named it, too. Both “tea” and “chai” are derived from the Chinese word for tea.

Tea wasn’t cultivated in India until the nineteenth century, when it was introduced by colonial British who literally stole tea plants and seeds from China in an act of corporate espionage. At that point in time, China had been cultivating tea for multiple millennia, and exporting it around the globe for several hundred years. India initially produced CTC (cut, tear, crush) tea on colonial plantations for export, only later (in the 1900s) selling tea to the domestic Indian market, when the practice of adding CTC black tea to masala chai took off in India.

What’s weird is that you’ve bought into some kind of alternate history where India invented tea.

Perhaps you should talk about how your beliefs have ratcheted towards the right, if that’s what you identify with. Or left. I’m not going to tell you how your beliefs evolved over the past few years or decades. I don’t pretend to know you.

I don’t know what your definition for liberalism is. So far, on Lemmy, “liberalism” seems to be anything to the right of tankie/Stalinist/Maoist. It seems to be just as broad as the right’s definition of it.

America is the arsenal of democracy. That’s as true now as it was when Franklin D Roosevelt said it.

I’d love to see NATO take over that role, or the EU take on a bigger share of it. Especially if they ensured the weapons were solely used in a defensive capacity. That would be great. But someone in “the west” needs to have a major military industrial complex.

And sure, other countries make some weapons. After all, everyone donates weapons to Ukraine. But we all know the majority is coming from the US. Nobody else has the arsenal to stand up to Russia’s USSR stockpile (though diminished) and China’s stockpile. Both Russia and China are hungry for more territory. Russia annexed Georgia, Ukraine, crushed the independence of Chechnya, and is right now trying to conquer enough of Ukraine to make a land bridge so they can go annex parts of Moldova. After that, they’re highly likely to try taking land from one of the Baltics, probably Latvia or Lithuania.

China has invasion in its past (have you already forgotten about Tibet? The Tibetans haven’t forgotten, although forced sterilization, mass famine, and insanely high rates of suicide have decreased the number of them, part of China’s campaign of Han supremacy and cultural genocide) and invasion in its future (started with Taiwan, but they are also eying Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and someday perhaps even Russia).

The world isn’t a safe place. It’s full of conflict.

If you want to see what life is like without the US military industrial complex at your back, keep your eye on Armenia. They’re working as fast as they can to build ties to the US, but I don’t think it’ll come together fast enough to save them from Russian-backed Azerbaijan.

If the whole world disarmed, then disarmament would be a great thing. But preaching disarmament while the “global threat of violence” actually exists is carrying water for the very real authoritarian dictators who currently wish to build an empire at the expense of other people’s freedom and sovereignty.

I think the default or mixed gender plural is the masculine io ending. Them’s the rules of Spanish, as I was taught.

Sure, if you think preparation and ingredients don’t matter. Enjoy a hot, steaming, cup of Saturn.

It’s actually worse than you being incapable of reading between the lines. When presented with evidence, you denied it rather than thanking the person who provided it. So you were asking stupid questions to set up a bad faith argument. Congratulations on being an Elon dick sucker and douchbag.

LOL I know how to spell degrees. I probably hit the wrong key and spellcheck autocorrected it to something random. Welcome to 2024.