I’ve been in contract with them for 15 years and have a pretty exact idea of how much work they put in and how much they spend, read: far less than their own house, because they care more about keeping themselves comfortable than their literal job of providing housing for others.

Let’s list the total major repairs that our landlord has had to do in 15 years:

• 1 roof replacement
• Fixing a basement wall that crumbled because they ignored it’s obvious water damage for 20 years
• Fixing water damage on the ceiling from the roof they left and didn’t replace long after it was leaking
• Replacing one washing machine.

Over 15 years that is on average 1-2 hours of work a month, and those expenses do not even come close to adding up to the difference between his property taxes and what he charges us for rent.

It’s really not complicated. If landlording was an actual job that paid appropriate hourly wages, than OP’s aunt wouldn’t be able to landlord SEVEN houses while still working a full time job. The fact that she can and makes significant money off those houses means that she is essentially giving herself houses that are paid for by her tenants.

By your logic, what happens when the roof needs to be replaced and it costs $15,000 to do that? The rent goes up by $15,000 that year? That’s ridiculous.

This is why rent is higher than a particular year’s costs – it includes capital costs over a period of time. $15,000 over 15 years is $1,000/year or about $84/mo.

I was including predictable ongoing building maintenance costs spread over time as part of operating costs.

Add that to the cost of landscaping, utilities, turnover costs, plus a wage for the owner. Why is the wage $25/hour? Why not $100/hour? It’s a skilled job.

Lmao, no it’s not. It does not require a degree or any kind of specialized training. And tell me what landlord actually spend 10 hours per month working on an individual property, every month. If you want to nitpick the example we should lower that to probably 1.

This describes any financial transaction in a capitalist system.

No it does not. If I pay you to build a water desalinating machine then suddenly we’ll have an abundance of fresh water. We’ve increased the available supply of drinking water overall.

Similarly building more housing is not as morally bankrupt as buying up existing housing and renting it back out at a profit. If you actually build more housing, you are providing a service; if you only get paid for the hours you work, you only make a reasonable amount of money, and you do a good job, you might actually be net benefit to society as a whole, as you are increasing the available supply of housing for people.

On the other hand when you live in a city where there is a limited supply of housing and you buy that up and rent it back to people at a profit so that you don’t have to work, you are simply draining the system of resources.

There is a reason that economists literally use the term ‘rent-seeking’ to describe behaviour that is personally profitable while draining the efficiency of the system as a whole, and not all types of businesses (and thus investment in them) are considered to be rent-seeking.

Lots of perfectly nice, pleasant, and moral people do jobs that make the world a worst place because of the circumstances they find themselves in. I would separate out how you treat and judge people, from the problematic systems that they might operate in.

But unless your aunt is only charging them what it costs her to operate the buildings + a reasonable hourly wage for the actual time she spends on the house every year, then yeah it’s immoral.

If she puts in 10 hours a month and charges rent that is equal to her costs (not the property / mortgage costs, but just the ongoing operating and maintenance costs) + 120hrs of her time per year x ~$25/hr (or whatever wage is livable in your area) then it’s fair, but realistically, assuming $6000 of property taxes, that would mean she would be charging ~$800 / month for that town home, and I’m guessing she’s charging a lot more. In effect, that means that she is making renters pay for her mortgages while she’s not working, and at the end of the day she will end up a multimillionaire off of her tenants’ hard work.

On top of the fact that there are undoubtedly renters who would want to buy those townhomes but can’t afford to only because landlords have bought up a limited supply and driven up prices.

At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.

Oh wow, she has to do up to 40 whole hours of work a year, she totally deserves a full time salary for that!

When landlords “invest” in the housing market, they are not making the system of providing housing for people better or more efficient. They are buying up a limited supply of properties that exist in desirable areas and then charging people for the right to use them plus a nice profit for themselves. This reduces the supply for a necessary good and drives up prices, making it profitable for landlords, and a massive, efficiency draining, example of rent-seeking for the system as a whole since the landlord’s basically don’t work and instead take a cut of what everyone else makes doing useful work.

If you invest in some predatory companies you might be investing in companies that do that, or might do some other predatory practice, but you can also just be putting money into a business so that it has more money to grow its operations, or invest in some new efficiency that makes them run better, and that then both returns a profit back to both of you and helps improve the system as a whole.

Think about it this way, when you retire, you are going to need money to sustain you for a long time after you stop being able to work, so while you’re working, you need to save that money up. That money can just sit in your bank account doing nothing for anyone, or you can invest it in a business that lets them use those resources now and lets you get your retirement money back 30 years from now when you need it (though in reality that’s spread across hundreds of companies to reduce risk). That’s how investment can be a net benefit to society and make for a better use of resources, characteristics not present with landlords and housing investments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_murders

So do my coworkers

This sounds like someone who’s never worked on a large Python project with multiple developers. I’ve been doing this for almost two decades and we never encounter bugs because of mismatched types.

Have you worked on major projects in other languages in that time period to be able to compare and contrast?

The last two python projects I had to work on didn’t have bugs because of type issues, but it was much harder to come into the codebase and understand what was going on given that you didn’t have type information in many many places which forced you to go back and comb through the code instead.

Yeah, working on python projects professionally is always a nightmare of configuring env variables and trying to get your system to perfectly match the reference dev system. I find Node.js projects to often be the simplest and most pain free to setup, but even compiled languages like C# and Java are often easier to get up and going than python.

I don’t mean this insultingly because lots of programming jobs don’t require this and for the ones that do we still tend to all start here, but in all honesty this sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s never worked on a large project maintained by multiple people over time.

First of all, the hysteria over semicolons is ridiculous when JavaScript, Typescript, C#, Java, Go, Swift, etc. etc. wil all automatically highlight missing semicolons, if not automatically insert them for you when paired with an IDE and standard linter. On top of that, JavaScript and Typescript do not require semicolons at all, but they are still used alongside braces, because they make your code more scannable, readable, and moveable.

Secondly, without type safety your code is no longer predictable or maintainable. If you’re working to quickly sketch out some new fangled logic for a research paper it’s one thing, if you need to write test code so that your codebase can be tested an infinite number of times by other coders and whatever CI/ CD pipelines to make sure that nothing’s broken, then all of the sudden you start seeing the value in strict typing.

Honestly, complaining about type safety adding “extra code” is a complaint that almost every coder has when they start out, before you eventually realize that all that “extra code” isn’t just boiler plate for no reason but is adding specificity, predictability, reusability, and maintainability to your code base.

When defining types looked like this it was one thing:

String name = new String("Charles Xavier");

But when it looks like this, there’s no reason not to use strong typing:

const name = "Charles Xavier";

Lmao, bruh. How do people keep praising a language where messing up a space breaks everything and there is no real type system?

I think you misunderstand the point of hate speech laws, it’s not to not hear it, its because people rightly recognize that spreading ideas in itself can be dangerous given how flawed human beings are and how some ideas can incite people towards violence.

The idea that all ideas are harmless and spreading them to others has no effect is flat out divorced from reality.

Spreading the idea that others are less than human and deserve to die is an act of violence in itself, just a cowardly one, one step divorced from action. But one that should still be illegal in itself. It’s the difference between ignoring Nazis and hoping they go away and going out and punching them in the teeth.

Except that they’ve been largely unsuccessful at the legal level. Courts in every western country recognizes the valid right to protest Israel and the actions of the Israeli government and expressly does not consider that anti-Semitic or hate speech.

There have been a few minor edge cases in some countries around controversial slogans like ‘From the River to the Sea’, and directly expressing support for organizations like Hamas, but by and large hate speech laws have not been abused. They’re mostly used to shut down and arrest neo Nazis and xenophobic rioters.

Israeli propaganda money is much better spent on convincing business leaders and the public at large that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic than it is at trying to convince constitutional lawyers.

Ah, you’re so terminally online that you brand anyone who mildly disagrees with you a ‘bot’.

Tho fair point about the EDL.

At the societal level with hate speech laws you can’t use bots though. You’re going to have to waste the courts time by wasting real people’s time dragging them in front of judges for protest actions. Eventually the courts will just make it a fine that police can quickly issue.

The UK is the weird outlier but there is still a defense of truth in the UK. The difference is that the person accusing you of defamation doesn’t have to prove that you’re wrong and you do have to prove that you’re right.

These are mostly incidents of people publicly expressing support for Hamas, and being arrested for expressing support for a designated terrorist organization, and pretty much all confined to the UK, which has some of the weakest individual protections in the EU / western world.

They also don’t have Nazi parades down their streets in 2024.

Those would not be considered hate speech laws in other countries, just normal no-uttering-threats laws. Hate Speech laws typically protect against inciting hatred or violence against an identifiable group, actually uttering threats is typically a different broader law.

In which countries is that the case?