we all made it a long time ago

We operate under the depression-era assumption that per-capita GDP is some kinda gold-standard metric for evaluating how well a country is doing economically. In reality per-capita GDP is just tracking the trash changing hands. We also overemphasize transactionality because of this. It's somehow much better from an "economic perspective" to have everyone buying new shirts every week even if it's the same people buying and then tossing the same fast fashion junk in the trash.
When you consider other metrics we could be judged by such as the OP is kinda pointing at here, our country looks way fucking worse on the leaderboard.
We ought to use the measures of the material conditions of our population to drive policy rather than how much currency has changed hands and how many worthless transactions have occurred.
- Yeah that's how Canada is pretending it's not been in a recession for years. Out of control housing market has inflated the GDP on paper, when everyone else can basically go fuck themselves I guess according to the government

This concept has a name. Artificial Scarcity.
- Yeah, scarcity is created artificially by people who don't want to give their stuff for free to complete strangers.
  
  or maybe by not taxing people who have made much more than they can consume (and deserve) in 10 lifetimes?

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.
- Man that's bullshit and you know it. Yeah a rich class is not exactly directly subject to work or starve, but people who write stuff like this don't realize they are in that rich class. I guarantee you've never met or heard of anyone starving ain't an anorexic or lost in the barrens. There has to be people doing the actual work, and people like you doing what amounts to fancy book keeping and service industries for the next class of people it's very plain you're envious of.
  
  I'm not sure I follow. What do you think is bullshit?
  Someone still needs to do work, but not everyone needs to work all the time.
  
  Cost of living differs across the world. While you may think that someone living in the US is "rich", and that might be true compared to the rest of the world, within the US it may mean middle class or borderline lower class depending on the living context.
  Say you make $60,000 USD per year as a single adult with no dependents. You'd do ok in Chicago, but would be scraping by in New York City.
  Compare that same $60,000 to somewhere outside the US like Rio de Janiero in Brazil, and you'll see that the you'll make over 12 times the average living wage there. Conversely, if you took Brazil's yearly living wage of ~$4,700 and applied it to the US, then you'd be below the average poverty line.
  It does us no good to debate how good we have it vs you, or vice versa. (Almost) all of us live under capitalism, and although costs of living vary across the world, this isn't an argument against UBI. The same issues the US experiences likely are also felt by citizens of many other countries, unless you live somewhere that has already introduced these sorts of safety nets.
  Your point about "hard" labor (work done with body) vs "soft" labor (work done with mind and/or little body) doesn't argue against this either. The economy is greatly stratified. We all don't have to do the agriculture anymore, like when humans first transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers. There are many other things to do and things we can provide for each other, some good some bad. And this also isn't to say that hard labor is worse than soft labor, or vice versa. They are mainly different kinds of experiences. No judgement need be applied, although many cultures tend to do so. This is one of many reasons why you see and have seen across history labor unions stick up for hard laborers against the "soft laboring" wealthy. This prejudice needs to be uprooted across the world imo.
  I 100% agree with you that many formulations of "rich countries" depends on colonizing and extracting wealth from "poor countries". That is not right. Every country should be able to produce for its own, with help offered in the form of imports/exports of goods & labor to every country. It is not fair that the Global South essentially funds the Global North.
  Instead of pointing that out and blaming an entire hemisphere of people for that, we should instead be looking to those in our countries that wield power and make this system the way it is. A farmer in the US Is no different than a farmer in Brazil, at least in terms of the class struggle. It would all benefit us if we see that class divide everywhere in the world, and join together to try to defeat it.
- If not everyone needs to work, then who needs it? Why should you work while others don't?
  
  We would probably be fine if people who wanted to work just kept working. Or if we had universal basic income, so people could more freely choose if they wanted to trade their time+labor for something else.
  Like, if absolutely no one wants to tend the fields then that's going to be a problem for food. I think there are enough people who would do it because they want to, especially for jobs that are local. But even if not, you could still offer money. Having basic income (or some other mechanism to assure basic needs are met) in place means it's much less coercive, because it's no longer a question of labor or suffer
- 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.
  
  Consumerism is used for wealth redistribution.
  Real wealth production occurs when machines create work, saving time. Work = money.
  
  I guess? With enough money you can just buy bonds, which sort of depend on consumerism but indirectly. Some municipal bonds return like 5%. 5% of a shit load of money is enough to live on.
- 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.
- 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.

CONSOOOOOOOM
- REDUSTRIBUUUUTE
- OBEY CONFORM SUBMIT

Blows my mind how you operate under the notion that we should give houses to homeless people.
- I assumed you were purely a satire account, that you couldn't be that daft as to miss the sarcasm dripping from many of the replies, or your complete lack of human decency. Turns out you are a bot/miscreant that joined less than a day ago to spread your vitriol and muddy the water. Maybe one day the tin man will find his heart.
- I guarantee you, you're a lot closer to being homeless than you think. And if ever you will be in a situation like that, I hope you only meet people like yourself. Scum.
- Ugh, we'll be bloody feeding them next!
- Give food to the hungry. Give medicine to the sick. Why would you not give homes to the homeless? Unless you're wicked.
- Should we... not?
  
  They're obviously a troll.
  
  Why should we?

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.
- The first thing you say is absolutely correct but I have no idea what you mean by the second
  
  Food being wasted instead of given out. Clothing slashed and tossed away. Housing boarded up and left vacant in the name of investing.
  All in the name of maximizing sales and profit. Resources hoarded and wasted.
  30% of the worlds resources would be sufficient to meet everyone's needs if properly distributed.
  But it's not because corporations see a homeless man taking a sandwich out of the trash as a lost sale.

I keep wondering if we have reached or are on the cusp of a post-scarcity society.
- Scarcity isn't just about how much stuff there is, it's also about how much access people have to stuff. So no, we sadly haven't got there yet in my opinion
  
  No I agree with the logistics of it. I meant to say the manufacturing and agricultural capacity we already have seems like more than enough.

Here in the Netherlands, the government agency for housing has the figures on how many second homes people own, but refuses to publish it.
Journalists have estimated that the number is about equal to the number of people looking for a house. About 400K on a population of 18M.
The scarcity is artificial.
- The scarcity is artificial.
  Artificial in a way that people don't want to give their houses for free to a complete strangers?
- I don't think owning a second home per se is wrong or evil. Many people can't afford buying a house due to the upfront costs. But owning a second home and leaving it empty for years? Owning multiple homes to use as Airbnbs in residential areas? I really wish this was regulated. But it will never be because there's big bucks being made there.
  
  I'm even ok with them owning a second house - but I think simple, easily understood answers are what's called for in this day and age (nuance is so easily corrupted) so here's my pitch
  You have a second house? If it's empty for 6 months, your taxes start going up. By a year it should be more then the house value rises, and it should just keep going up
  Same with apartments and any property opening companies. Honestly, I'd be fine saying it all starts when your household owns at least three homes
  You can surrender the house to the government to be rented at cost, maybe for a tax write-off for the first 10 years or something, otherwise it should just keep rising to insane levels.
  I want people begging for renters. Developers should slash their prices to move units quickly - it'll incentivize more affordable housing. Hell, I want landlords so desperate they pay people to inhabit them for a fixed time period.
  And that's why I like 3 - you had to move and your house isn't selling? I don't want to screw over individuals, there's easier people to. You have a vacation house? Fine, but if you move you better get your empty house sold.
  It'll cause all kinds of problems, but we have empty homes and homeless people - that's just uncivilized
  
  I do. There's a full blown climate crisis. How much of an extra footprint is a second home? How much wilderness is destroyed by peoples desire to have a nice view while they sip their coffee? We all need to look inward and ask what we're actually entitled to.
  Al Gore said it best; it's an inconvenient truth.
- There's also so much bureaucratic pushback to building new houses for all sorts of bullshit reasons. The scarcity is indeed artificial and this is the kind of corruption that we accuse 3d world countries of. Except here it's called "lobbying".
- Those second homes by the beach usually aren't where the unhoused need them, and they probably couldn't afford them anyway
  
  Are you still talking about the Netherlands? Unless it's on one of the islands, I don't see how a house near the beach could be in a bad location
  
  Most of them, along with most houses in general, are in cities where the unhoused do need them.

It is true that there will never be enough to satisfy the greediest among us. Unless there’s some kind of global revolution this will continue until the end
- Wow, I didn't like billionaires very much, but if the alternative is a global revolution, then I guess I can put up with billionaires.

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.

It doesn't blow my mind, it infuriates me

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.

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.

And people think it's the fault of the poor that they don't have enough :)
- Nooo, how could that be. It's the fault of the successful wealthy people who refuse to share their stuff for free with complete strangers.

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.
- That's why people want to go to mars btw. Some people are economists/adventurers and can't stand still. Doing business on Earth however starts to be more and more damaging as we're exhausting the possibilities of healthy growth. That's why it's better to cease economic growth on earth and instead focus the "line must go up (at any cost)" people on Mars. Just my two cents from the ecological perspective.
  
  Yeah sure, it's much more easy to colonize Mars than to do something about the Earth.
  
  except making mars even somewhat habitable is a centuries long undertaking, decades after decades of cost without even a glimmer returns on the horizon. The Line Go Up folks only talk about it because they're delusional, not because it actually gives them what they want.

Not enough memes. Besides that, definitely agree.

We also dont have enough water, living on a enormous water planet. :)
- Why so salty.
  
  I dont think salt is an unsolvable problem. Its just that as usual, it needs to be profitable to solve it. Currently its just being used as a fake resource limitation. That problem would quickly be solved if humanity had to.
  
  People put electrolytes in their water and nobody batts an eye, but when I drink seawater everybody loses their mind

Brings to mind the barbecue speech
How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with.
- american rhetoric: okay, imagine you have 10 steaks right?
- I can't believe this is my first time reading this. Thanks for sharing
- man this man that. If I lived in the time people were all referred to as men I would probably go crazy and blow up the world.

this
that
away
empty
people
clothing
- That's a good typographic river. Nice find!
  
  Ahhhh I couldn’t remember the term, thank you!
- this…Blows
- D33P

There's a house on my way to work that's vacant. I saw an ambulance there about two years ago; I'm betting that the owner died, because it's now entirely overgrown, with weeds and grass completely overtaking the yard and driveway.
How many of the 'empty houses' are places that were abandoned and are in such disrepair that they're not safe for habitation, and how many of them are places that are second houses and/or bank-owned rentals?
For reference, the house I live in right now was repo'd around 2010, and my partner and I bought it in 2018; it had been vacant for almost a decade, and required a lot of work, almost as much as it cost, to get it safe. And it still needs work; I need to shore up the floor that's sagging, and the exterior walls need to be opened up from the inside and be fully sealed b/c I can feel breezes inside when it's windy outside.
- There's no reason to believe that a formerly homeless person wouldn't put in the effort on a house restoration project if given the chance to live in it permanently.
  
  Ever renovated a house? Shit's expensive.

I agree.
Economic growth on Earth is coming to an end, and it's important to recognize it and deal with it properly. It doesn't make sense to scare people into work by telling them "otherwise we don't produce enough". We do. Whether people work 60 hours a week or 20 hours. We should just recognize what we really need. Which is the right to self-determination.

Lots of less expensive housing in the suburbs and country, go live in them. The reduced noise and air pollution is great.
- 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.
- 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
  
  A house in the suburb for both norcal and socal is about 1.5m
  A 3br 3ba 2,155sqft home in the suburbs elsewhere is $350k. It was literally the first one I looked up, these are everywhere. Here is another, a 3br 4ba 2,864sqft in the suburbs in a completely different state for $352k. Again, this was literally just the second one I looked up, these things are everywhere. Spending $1.5m on a house is crazy talk.
  
  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.

pfff. wrong.
1 third of all ppl have access to a washingmachine. there not enough resources to build one for everyone. or cars etc..
- Couldn't we just share laundromats and busses?
  
  good question in an otherwise delusional sub.
  ofcourse your question has been asked and from what i remember not even the reddist leftwinger in the first world would give up on a washingmachine.
  so im theory yes, but with real humans sharing does not work out.
- Well if we stopped building useless shit…
  How much washing machines can you build for an average yacht’s worth of ressources time and energy?
  Probably not enough but it’s not like there wasn’t other useless shit being made nor like a lot of households would not do just fine sharing a washing machine.
  
  no doubt. but claiming there enough resources for a rising number of ppl is wrong and keeps points out of the discussion that might come in handy for humanity later. sure eat the rich, but ppl will still be hungry.