By the way, tomorrow's already the fifth…
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
560 points (94.4% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
15341 readers
1242 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article
--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
After dealing with 9-5s for many years, they deserve it. The worst category i've ever dealt with. I have death with rich and poor but OMG! 9-5s are the fkin worst.
Rent-seeking behavior is unfortunately very common.
That’s the most brainrot thing I’ve read this week.
I'm surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
A lot of these people are likely tech folks. A lot of tech folks get high paying jobs. They used that pay to buy rental property.
A lot of these guys are landlords and are trying to convince people that the rent they charge is fair, market rate, and a favour because they're taking on "risk" while you pay for their mortgage.
Look I'll be honest, as a renter, I've not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that's even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else's pockets.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Hey I'm not really worried, my landlord is actually really cool. The place I live in is actually better than the place he lives in. My rent is well well below market rate for what I should be paying. I lived in the same place for the past 11 years and he's only raised my rent twice for less than $200 total. Not all landlords are bad, not all of them are in it just to get rich. And not all of us would be able to buy a house regardless of paying rent or not. And I'd much rather pay rent to somebody for a nice place to live then be living in a tent by the river.
Damn, you're right. It's like how I'm not worried about wealth inequality because I lucked out and have a steady 60k a year job with a nice employer. Not all employers are bad.
Or how I don't give a shit about abortion because I made the stone-cold choice to not be a woman.
When things aren't affecting me they don't matter so why are people making a big deal about it?
Nope, gotta kill your landlord and then get in a shootout with the cops when they come to ~~his~~ your house, you heard the tankies. Time to die for their utopia soldier!
I'm not lol. .world is basically Reddit 2.0, warts and capitalists included 😆
load more comments
(6 replies)
I do not believe that which was created through collective labor should be able to be enclosed, so that the encloser can extort others for access.
The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers--in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.
The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.
Moreover--and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring--the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.
A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?
Kropotkin
Rent isn't theft. It's payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.
There are benefits to renting. You don't have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don't have to do maintenance or pay someone to do it for you, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.
And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn't be allowed, though.
This is one of the most capitalist takes you'll ever see on lemmy. I wonder if this person is a landlord or has landlords in the family...
Owning a house isn't a service.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service.
What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant? The landlord doesn't develop the property, that's the builder. The landlord doesn't maintain the property, that's done by contractors. The landlord doesn't secure the property, that's done by the state. The landlord often doesn't even finance the property, as the property is inevitably mortgaged and underwritten by banks one step removed from the title holder.
Quite literally, the only thing landlords do is collect the check and transfer portions of it onward. They are, at best, payment processors. And even this job is routinely outsourced to a third party.
There are benefits to renting.
There are lower institutional barriers to renting than to owning, largely resulting from the artificial shortage of public land and public housing. Rents are the consequence of real estate monopolization and public malinvestment. Once the landlords themselves vanish, the "benefits" of renting vanish with them.
And not all landlords are rich people.
There's an old joke Donald Trump likes to tell, back in the 90s when he was underwater on his personal holdings. He's driving through Lower Manhattan in a limo with his daughter and he points out the window to a homeless man. Then he quips, "I'm $800M poorer than that man". To which his daughter replies, "If that's true why are we in a limo while he's out on the street?"
The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor's problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank's problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder's problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter's problem.
The landlord's financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.
I'm not saying there aren't other system of distribution people to homes, and I'm not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I'm just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.
This is completely ignorant of the fact that landlords can get insurance for those things and often dont have to pay anything at all. And when they do have to pay themselves, they will pay the minimum amount possible to maximize their profits often resulting in degrading housing that people living in suffer the consequences for.
Housing is a human right. Capitalism commits violence against the people by denying them shelter. It's a crime against humanity. Landlords exist only to profit off of this system. By your own exact definition all homeowners are the same point of risk mitigation, and therefore all renters would also be the same point of risk mitigation. Landlords have inserted themselves as a middle man to steal the labor of the working class. They profit off of the venture. Thats the whole point of them doing it.
Go and have a look at property prices over the last 50 years and see how risky it is.
Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?
As with most things, it is a matter of degree.
Should hotels be illegal too?
If they're monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.
What if you cannot afford to buy a house
There are 16M vacant homes to distribute among around 770k homeless people. With such an enormous housing surplus, why is the clearing price for a housing unit so far above a new prospective buyer's budget?
You posit that people can't afford to buy homes without asking why homes are unaffordable.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
In that article, the word "investors" is deliberately lumping together individuals, and institutions/corporations, in an obvious attempt to trick people into thinking that category is comprised entirely of the latter. Underhanded semantic maneuver. Within the same article:
While large institutional investors continue to get most of the headlines in the single-family rental space, small investors account for more than 90% of the market.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
You're intentionally leaving out that the landlord maintains the property and appliances. That's no small thing.
There are absolutely bad landlords who will do as little as their tenants will allow them to, for sure. Landlords aren't like cops though, the continuing existence of bad landlords is not enabled by good ones like how "good cops" do.
The landlord uses my rent money to pay others to maintain the property. It's an entirely middle man position of zero value to society
You can own a property and pay landscapers and handyman for less than the cost of renting. Hell, I've had landlords pay property managers to handle even that.
Good landlords will only be as good as they need to be, to continue renting. In a housing shortage, that means they will keep getting worse over time, doing little and hearing little from their tenants who have only ever dealt with predatory landlords.
They will almost always charge as much as they can, not doing anything to help the renters.
The exceptions to this will be invisible on the market, because renters will do everything in their power to never move out or change their situation.
Long time renters are trapped, because they are paying nearly as much as a mortgage, and getting no equity from it, unable to save a down payment to get out of it.
Renting to seasonal, temp workers or students is about the only exception where renting is a necessary service, but currently its way over priced, so its not a great value. So still predatory.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
Been renting the last 20 years, and I can rightfully say FUCK YOU!!!
Can you agree it's at least exploitative?
It can be exploitative, but it's not automatically so. Both parties benefit from the agreement in different ways.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
These days it is hard to own a house, its like the system is designed to cater to the burguoise - because it is. Regular people cant have their own personal ownership because capitalist leeches known as landlords exist.
The system feeds on the profiting of others misfortunes.
Or more like we let companies own private homes and that fucked the market together with Airbnb
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›