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.

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 can’t wait to put your Sweady balls in my mouth.

Wendy’s chicken nuggets are vile, too. Chicken tenders are the only thing good. And Wendy’s doesn’t serve them anymore. Neither does McDonald’s. So… KFC wins.

And the taste.

Three condoms? My, we’re young and frisky, aren’t we?

Funny, when I opposed the Iraq invasion in 2001 (and 2008 and beyond) I was called a bleeding heart liberal, but now I’m accused of supporting the Iraq war, “enhanced interrogation,” “extraordinary rendition,” “indefinite detention,” Guantanamo Bay, etc for saying there’s nothing wrong with being a liberal.

I really wish the world would pick one definition of liberalism rather than just labeling whatever they don’t like “liberalism.”

I seem to recall that the apex of Republicanism in 2008 was the Tea Party, which I never identified with in the slightest. No, that was 2009. 2008 was when Mitt Romney was campaigning on the idea of strapping the family dog to the roof of the car. Is that what you think liberalism is? A Mitt Romney republican?

Yes

The reason I didn’t take your examples of “Communist countries tremendous success” seriously is because you were comparing apples to oranges. Seriously, comparing starvation to food insecurity is ludicrous. It is possible to actually compare deaths from starvation per 100,000 people, but that’s not what you did. Because to do that, you’d have to A) rely on something other than propaganda and B) Recognize that China hasn’t entirely eliminated hunger, much less deaths from starvation. Although they have made great progress in reducing the numbers since their series of famines. You also ignored that the Soviet Union didn’t experience famine because they relied on foreign aid - food aid - for a number of years. So that helped keep their people fed: Food given freely by capitalist pigs who deserve to be murdered for their mere existence in a more successful economy.

As for the great purge, it was followed by years of lesser purges.

The idea that the west does not change courses or look at past programs as a mistake is obviously quite invalid, so there was no point in even mentioning it. But since you cling to that idea, great. Obviously we’ve changed our minds on some things, as the Trail of Tears is now seen as wrong, as is the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Slavery and Jim Crow fall into those categories as well. The War on Drugs is also seen as a failure, despite the fact that it totters on for now.

I don’t watch John Oliver, moron. There is no nuance in this discussion because you are clearly incapable of it.

You are right about one thing: My horror over the deaths caused by communism, including the killing of kulaks, is why I am not a communist. Your gleeful appreciation of the righteousness of democide under communism doesn’t make you a communist. It makes you deeply disturbed individual who is incapable of empathy. It likely points to sociopathy, or some other element of the dark triad, with the political beliefs adopted as a fig leaf to cover your antisocial tendencies.

I don’t expect a response.

The US isn’t about to be invaded by anyone. We have a very powerful military. So there is no threat in the world we live in, aside from the threat from internal extremists and asymmetrical warfare (ie terrorism). If the world were quite different, and we had no military power, we’d be at risk from a number of adversaries. Possibility the greatest threat would be foreign-backed “separatism” as occurred in Ukraine in 2014 (which is simply a covert invasion that is disguised as a civil war).

There’s literally nothing wrong with being a liberal. It’s really quite preferable to a number of the alternatives. It must kill you that the majority of people don’t remotely support your political views.