Just to add an anecdotal example, I used to live in a condo complex where each building contained 10 units which all shared one master meter. Instead of each unit having it’s own water meter all 10 units would be billed as one. Functionally it didn’t matter because the water bill for all the buildings was paid by the HOA through our HOA dues which were fixed at $185 per month.
Shortly before I moved the HOA was having significant issues with the water bill because while most buildings had a monthly bill of ~$600 (or $60 average per unit) two buildings had a monthly water bill of ~$2500 per month (or $250 average per unit). The HOA had had the city come out twice to look for exterior leaks and had paid three different plumbers to check for internal leaks, but either they couldn’t find one or simply there wasn’t one.
If we assume that there was no leak, and the average per unit water usage should be $60, and only one unit was spiking the water usage that would mean one unit was using $1960 per month of water.
I later heard from people I knew there that the HOA had found one unit was being rented to a family with 10 people in a 2 bedroom who was also running an illegal restaurant from the unit (as in people were coming up to the front window and buying styrofoam trays of food to go).
I don’t hate the hustle or people trying to get by, but I’ve absolutely have seen situations where people getting something for free means they over use it.
They weren’t over using it because it was free, though, that’s the thing. They were using it for a legitimate purpose: feeding others and supporting themselves financially. They didn’t choose how the complex handled billing for water, and people like this will usually happily pay their fair share given the opportunity. We as a society act like people cramming their ten person family into a two bedroom apartment are the ones taking advantage of the system when it’s 1000% the other way around.
and people like this will usually happily pay their fair share given the opportunity.
That’s speculation at best. People cramming 10 people into a 2 person home isn’t taking advantage of a system, but using 32x more water than the average user is. They were running this business out of their home without required health and safety inspections, it was in violation of the HOA rules, and almost certainly in violation of the terms of their lease. After I left, the HOA put in sub-metering so each unit did have to pay their own water bill.
Your argument is that most people are willing to do things the right way if they have the opportunity, but clearly they couldn’t have made this happen legitimately or else they would have rented a business location or started a food truck. It’s not excusable to do things the wrong way and benefit because if you had done it the right way you wouldn’t have benefited.
It’s like if I said, “I only ran this profitable illegal business because if I had done it legally it wouldn’t be profitable. Yeah, I lack the opportunities in life (like a rich family) to have done this legitimately so that totally excuses me taking advantage of my neighbors.”
I’m all for saying fuck corporations, but this is just hurting your direct neighbors and breaking health and safety laws that are meant to keep people safe.
That’s speculation at best.
I mean that’s what you’re doing, too. That’s part of having a conversation. There are statistics that back my speculation, but at the end of the day we’re discussing strangers.
That being said, people making the best of their situation are never taking advantage of a system, especially a system designed specifically to keep them down. You think they’re crammed into that condo, five to a bedroom, by choice? The 32x water usage is nothing compared to what corporations take from us every second of every minute of every day when they’re actually taking advantage of the system. This family is, again, feeding people and simply trying to survive. The system wants you to condemn the family of immigrants rather than the single billionaires taking exponentially more from each of us and doing exponentially more damage. And that’s not speculation, that’s how it is. And they should have had individual meters in the first place, so let’s not act like that’s the consequence of some grave injustice, either. Would have prevented the whole issue in the first place.
It’s funny how billionaires all seem to have 10 houses isn’t it?
I mean, if I had, essentially, unlimited money, and there were places in the world I liked to visit repeatedly, and I don’t mean “for a weekend” but months or seasons at a time? Hell yeah I’d buy a house there.
At a minimum, one Southern Hemisphere, one Northern Hemisphere. Never see Summer again.
Poor dears and their scarcity mindset, overcompensating. Always needing more. Always egged on by the fear of loss and insecurity, and fear of those with less, wanting what they have.
:D
Reminded me of the response I have my irc bot offer any time someone says “human nature”:
did someone say human nature? you mean like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQnUFxoFqNY yes?
(To which I’ve now added that image link).
Well, in some apartment complex the water is included in the rent. It assumes everyone uses roughly the same amount but of course some uses more then others. Often the water consumption decreases when the apartments are updated and have to pay for their own water.
One specific case that was in the media a couple of years ago. He lived in an apartment where the water was included and he had a tortoise. He tortoise liked warm water so the guy filled up his bathtub and had the tortoise in it, and in order to keep the water warm he let the warm water flow continuously. Of course this resulted in a huge water bill for the company which owned the apartments and they sued the guy. If I remember correctly the court ruled that he used such a vast amount that he should have known it was not included and he was forced to pay back all the water.
And why would there not be a limit to free water
I dont pay for sewage and I crap as much as I want, too.
You definitely do pay for it in your taxes
Its like ‘but anarchism is so corruptable and exploitable!’ When liberalism is being owned by fasch and the biggest centralized statist communist powers either dissolved from corruption or turned shitlib.
The reactionaries can only complain about themselves and replace nouns to slander us.
Aka people will be ungrateful and I will profit less, therefore I’m not making the world a better place.
This is so wrong. I don‘t know where you live, but at least in Germany tap water is not free. Of course everyone drinks roughly the same amount of water, but most water is consumed in other ways where it totally matters to price it. For example taking a bath consumes much more water than showering. People have private pools where one fill-up can easily double the water consumption of a year.
The water pricing is actually progressive so the more you consume the more you have to pay per amount. This allows cheap prices for the average consumer and discourages to overconsume.
Water is precious and shouldn‘t be treated as an abundance.
Idk of this happens in Germany but in the U.S. some landlords, mostly smaller ones, will fold the water bill into the rent. So it is effectively “free” in that you are not charged by the amount you use.
In Germany that’s not a thing. You get billed separately for utilities by the landlord, and they have to show how they calculate your share from the building totals.
To add on that: I am pretty certain (not 100% sure) that it is illegal in Germany to make a profit with the utilities bill. Though some landlords try tricks to do it anyway.
But that kind fucks with rent prices no? Especially if the guy who consumes a lot of water left the building and the next person consumes next to nothing, its just an overpriced rent.
🤷♀️
This is why no pure economic theory will work in practice. Too many humans are ignorant psychos.
If no pure economic theory will work in practice, why does capitalism work exactly like Marx and Lenin predicted?
I think they just obvserved reality and then their answers to “well so what next?” is where people disagree with marx
That example misunderstands both communism and human behavior. Free access doesn’t mean unlimited misuse; rules, responsibility, and social norms still exist. By that logic, free roads would mean everyone drives endlessly until they crash. Reality is more complex than that.
That’s the entire point of the post. It’s called satire. They are satirizing people who don’t understand communism and human nature.
When someone says “human nature” I hear “unexamined biases necessary to keep unexamined to support my dog shit ideas” and they are always dog shit.
Having good health care means you just consume as much medicine as you can. I get vaccinated every day, I own 500 pairs of glasses, and all my teeth have been root canaled
I do chemo recreationally
Something interesting about this is that Bourgeois neoclassical economics manages to acknowledge that people won’t simply consume greedily, even if things are free.
Marginal Utility asserts that people will only consume commodities such that they satisfy some want or need. If I’m hungry, I’ll buy a banana, maybe a bunch to have later.
But my hunger won’t drive me to buy 800 bunches in one go, because that many bananas has a deminishing return in their marginal utility to satiate my hunger.
If that’s true, it doesn’t require market mechanisms for the distribution of goods and services to continue being true. Re: your healthcare example
With food, in particular, the value is in the supply chain not the ability to horde individual commodities. I don’t want 800 bananas, but I do want a banana stand on my corner where I can get fresh bananas daily.
In theory, markets are supposed to organically generate these social amenities and price them at the prevailing wage rate for the community, such that individuals bid into/out of existence goods and services through a pseudo-collective “expressed demand”.
In practice, choke points in the supply chain create opportunities for arbitrage and price fixing. So goods that should be cheap and abundant - like fruit - suddenly become expensive and scarce when a single enormous conglomerate (like the United Fruit Company) holds a vertical monopoly on the commodity.
This artificial scarcity is then used to justify price-rationing of the commodity. And pretty soon you’re selling people $500 Bijin Hime strawberries in a Japanese mega-mall, while working class people can’t afford basics.
I get vaccines for diseases that don’t even exist… Everyone has the small poxs vaccine but I also have medium poxs and even large poxs vaccination.
I will say one I don’t recommend is I got the mumps vaccine so I figured I should get a dumps vaccine… It just made me really constipated.
/s this is a joke, yes get your vaccines but only ones for real diseases…
Unironically did get my son the measles shot three months early, because he was starting daycare.
He still needed to get shots at 1 year and 18 months, but it let me sleep a little easier
Good idea with the spread these days.
Jokes aside, “great pox” is siphilis. I don’t know if there a medium pox…
If you have both does siphilis and small pox does it become mega or epic pox?
I’d rather not find out!
This reads like an excerpt from a Roald Dahl book.
I’ve gotten 17 fresh new hip replacements since I was 8.
I didn’t replace them, I just added them. I now have 19 hips. They don’t lie.
There’s actually limits on the frequency you can do stuff. From somewhere that has mostly feee healthcare.
I think they’re being sarcastic
Talking to a lot of Americans that is what they think though.
Humans will take more than they need of what’s free, if there’s a way to turn it into profit for them. If profit is allowed to be a way to secure power and control, there will always be be a desire to hoard for oneself.
Capitalism rewards hoarding and profiting, and also rewards making the in group as small as possible.
Other factors can cause hoarding as well to be clear, such as fear of scarcity/needs not being met.
This is an excellent insight.
If you’re not allowed to do profit then who would do trade and why? Nobody likes working in retail, nobody likes being a plumber. Markets can and should compensate and reward people fairly, the problem is some people are allowed to take too much, and even small profit can be made at the expense of others, will you have an investigative unit that decides when people have used enough water?
If you’re not allowed to do profit then who would do trade and why?
Because one can’t possibly own or learn everything so you’ll have to trade some thing you have for something you want. Skills, food, stuff, art, tools, music.
Are you arguing against a medium of exchange? Bartering is just less efficient trading.
It’s entirely unrelated to & still enables profit.
And while we’re at it, since it’s difficult to get everything you need in exchange for something they need, it would help to have a universal token of agreed upon value for us all to trade with. /s
Yes, capitalism is when money exists. Good point.
And your point here being…?
Are you implying that currency is a product of capitalism or that currency only exists under capitalist societies?
Lol, I’m no historian but I almost sure that currency has existed in basically all big societies way before capitalism was a thing…
It was implied by the parent comment they were responding to when it brought up trading non-monetary things. Is the lack of reading comprehension (here & here) willful?
Removed by mod
I love working in retail. I was a contract analyst for some years (very boring, highly paid and painstaking insurance work), now I work in a bakery as a barista, and I’m dragging my feet about finishing my masters because I don’t really want to stop working there.
Sometimes people are shitty, but it’s clear work that doesn’t stress me out at home and I’m glad to provide my community with bread.
I can’t really imagine plumbers hate being plumbers- it’s work that they train years for, with very transferable skills if they wanted to switch to anything else along the way. Do you have any evidence that plumbers hate their jobs?
yep. also people wont do any work if they dont have to because all their needs are met. this is why all rich people are retired.
this is why all rich people are retired.
Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society.
Functionally retired.
You see it all the time among Tech plutocracy, with Bezos’s Venice Wedding and Zuck’s endless home construction.
Aka the entirety of formula one (or any major sporting league really)
ok but elon musk works like 100 hours a day, so
And is still homeless
And don’t want us to have a 4-day week or work remote.
