This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544
Why is it assumed that the owner can afford to have her live rent free?
landlord
the kind of rich person that owns multiple houses
not a small business
There are independent landlords out there. One of my cousins rents out a bit of his property to some dude because its seperated by thick brush and its easier to just rent out the remote edges of the property than it is to make trails and do the required paperwork for the permit. He also rents a chunk out to the road maintenance company.
My point being theres landlords and then theres Landlords one is just someone renting out property for whatever reason and the other makes is running it as a business.
Who the fuck cares? It indicates a massive flaw with the system. Either they can’t afford it or we aren’t doing anything to help it, or they’re just exploiting her to gain more wealth. Whatever the reason is, it isn’t a justification. It’s only an indictment of the system that allows it to happen. The fact the police are used to support the little lordling and not the poor old woman just makes it worse.
The point is no one should be in a position to say no. I’m not saying I would do better as a landlord (I would, but that’s why I probably will never be a landlord), rather that the system is broken and no one should be, or at least not be allowed to deny this woman at minimum.
Is it so hard to imagine that there can be other incentives to work towards than profit? Profit is not a good goal for a system to prioritize. Can you agree with that? If so, can’t you imagine that a system could exist that prioritizes doing good or creating happiness or anything else?
neoliberalism and late stage capitalism in its essence
capitalism is terrorism
Among the countries you could have picked, I could not think of one that better supports the idea that capitalism is terrorism the way Cuba has been harrassed for decades for essentially doing some pragmatic reforms - to the point they were forced to side with the USSR to prevent invasion by the US.
Cuba is doing well despite brutal Imperialist sanctions from the US, but is not a developed country yet. People are driven by their Material Conditions, and are products of their Material Conditions, so it does not make sense to move from a developed to a developing country purely out of ideological purity.
Instead, people should try to shape the State they live in to be more equitable. Changing a Capitalist country to Socialist is a good thing.
Cuba that is self sufficient and has the best healthcare in the world? As well as the most beautiful beaches? Yeah it’s on my list if countries to flee to when Trump wins my dude.
Enjoy continuing to live in this shithole country.
Cuba makes a huge amount of money from the tourism industry and it doesn’t all get redistributed to the people according to their needs. Just because a country calls itself a communist country doesn’t mean it’s true. Believe it or not, the DPRK is not actually democratic or a republic.
Cuba is absolutely a Socialist country. The vast majority of industry is centrally planned by the state. There have been some market reforms to help participate in the global economy after the dissolution of the USSR, but there isn’t a Borgeoisie class in power.
This is ideological purity taken beyond rational extremes, if you believe any amount of Capitalism in a country is sufficient to call it Capitalist, then you would disagree with Marx, who advocated for gradually building up the productive forces so that Communism can be meaningfully achieved, and which also requires global Socialism.
Let me tell you a little secret (that is a lie, it just basic logic). The reason every “communist country” is in name only is because a real one can’t exist. Not for any real length of time anyway. As long as the system requires humans to make decisions, they will make selfish decisions. And socialism just make it so much easier for few decision makers to take all the power.
true, at least she wouldn’t be in jail for the crime of not being able to work with 93
True. Go move then. Or any other non capitalist country.
No? Maybe those are worse than capitalism and we should try to fix it instead of calling everyone terrorists? Ok then.
Should people get free housing at 92? At what point does a squatter get a free pass? Should we force the owner to give charity to the elderly squatter? What makes her more deserving than, say, Doctors Without Borders?
- Yes
- Ideally from birth
- If they’re wealthy enough, yes. Or ideally, people who can’t afford a home should be given one by the government. No landlords needed. Having a roof over your head should be a basic human right.
- Nothing. Again, basic human right. Everyone is entitled to a home.
It’s just especially sad and cruel, in reality housing should be decommodified.
What does that even mean? Concrete, lumber, electric, plumbing, plus location location location that everyone else wants. How can it NOT be a commodity with fluctuating prices based on basic market forces like supply and demand? Explain
An answer to your questions in order:
Yes. At the point where an owner can easily afford to lose that building as a tax write-off. Yes, if their own wellbeing isn’t dependent on that property, with a reasonable compensation for their loss. She was there first.
It may not be the right answer, but it is one.
She was there first?!? It’s the owner’s building! What does “easily afford to lose that building as a tax write-off” even mean? What do you know about tax? I presume zero based on your comment. smh
You forgot your own question?
What makes her more deserving than, say, Doctors Without Borders?
In the context of whether Doctors Without Borders or her, the only difference is who was there first.
The tax write-off bit means being rich enough that donating the building to charity won’t even make a dent in their wealth.
As for what I know about tax, only that I’d be happier knowing it’s being put to good use where it should be and not where it is being.
But the poor landlords!
Sort of the joke in Western countries. We took all the absolutely critical domestic infrastructure that we all agree needs to be funded and we all rely on to exist and passed it off to the most greedy sociopath assholes we could find.
Now we’re shocked to discover that our planes crash and our retirement homes price gouge and our tech companies just do fake money scams to the tune of $2.5 trillion dollars. Our local sports teams are all run by a big casino. Our universities are all run by sports team owners. Our domestic energy companies keep getting pranked by the fake money scammers, while complaining that environmentalists just made the price of natural gas go vertical. And our health care system is six hedge funds in a set of doctor’s scrubs.
But when push comes to shove, if you ask an American why this country seems to be circling the drain, the answer is some combination of “Woke Communist Joe Biden put transgenders in charge of the military industrial complex” and “Cheeto Mussolini Donald Trump gave Putin/Xi the sticky note with all our passwords on it, right after Barack Obama had fixed everything.”
You’d never even know Blackrock Financial, Goldman Sachs, Citadel Advisors, and Berkshire Hathaway exist, much less why they have more control over the global economy than any two dozen elected officials you could name.
if you ask an American why this country seems to be circling the drain
You could always ask. I know that I’m not the usual American but I’d say that the reason (and reason why nothing of note has been done about it since neoliberalism set its hooks) is as simple as the increase in wealth disparity.
That’s definitely a consequence of current policy, but it isn’t the cause.
We have domestic policies and social structures that encourage wealth aggregation. And we have certain administrative heads that champion these policies.
the real reason why american has gone down the shitter, ironically, is the existence of political parties. The parties ironically haven’t done anything themselves, though they’re trying to. It’s the lack of action outside of the parties that’s causing it.
If we weren’t so fucking laser focused on calling people idiots for no reason, we’d have a productive and healthy society. But no the elites have their own class, and they give us this shitty fodder to play with while bored, and we just fucking eat it up like pigs in a feed trough.
the real reason why american has gone down the shitter, ironically, is the existence of political parties.
I don’t know if I’m going to pin a failing economic model on the existence of organized political groups. That’s a hair’s breath shy of blaming poor economic policies on the existence of governments.
If we weren’t so fucking laser focused on calling people idiots for no reason
Its rarely for no reason. Mystifying the political process by asserting you have to be a Smartie to understand it is a method of Other-ing and alienating people from any kind of activism or intervention. Its a deliberate rhetorical technique intended to push people out of government.
we just fucking eat it up like pigs
We eat it up like pigs when the denouncement is aimed at the opposition. We recoil in offense when its aimed at us.
One of the big hopes of social media was to better organize and empower large groups of people by rapidly getting them up to speed on how political systems and effective interventions work. But Web2 and Web3 centralization of media, combined with a bunch of COINTELPRO style harassment of larger outside groups, has destroyed the foundations that local communities tried to build up in the 90s/00s.
This gets us back to big corporate interests simply owning everything. If you need to suck Elon’s cock in order to get any kind of positive media exposure on Twitter, the only political organizers with any effective purchase are going to be the current batch of white nationalists and tech bro sychophants Elon loves. Same with Facebook/Instagram/Threads and Google search results and Microsoft’s pet AI project ChatGPT.
If it looks like we’re eating like pigs, it might be because all we’re ever fed is slop.
political parties are symptomatic of voting systems. That is to say the number of political parties a place has depends on the kind of voting system it has.