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I find rent seeking abominable. This idea is a reaction to rent
seeking. Shelter should be a race to the bottom in prices, but
it's
not, it's a race to hoover up property to rent to suckers.
I'm not talking about unfairness of height, intellectual,
credibility
or any biological unfairness.
I'm talking about economic,
corporate unfairness, tax system, use of land.
We should be tracking all the ways that life can be unfair, so
that
we have visibility of unfairness. From the visibility, maybe we
can see who the culprits of unfairness truly are and how to
remove their acts.
We should be having conversations about child poverty, social
mobility and other forms of unfairness that are within society's
grasp of solving.
But how can we fix these inequalities?
https://www.economi...20120721_wwd000.jpg
[Voice, Dec 04 2020]
Government eugenics program
https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/
[spidermother, Dec 12 2020]
[link]
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The short version is "most humans are greedy".
Particularly with increasing house prices, I've always
wondered where does all the money go? Not too many years
ago, a person (generally a man, but I'm all for equality...)
could buy a house, support a spouse & 2-3 children and
afford the stuff of life, all on one income. These days, not
even close (for most people). Simple things like a house
should be getting rapidly cheaper (nail-gun vs. hammer, for
example, or even pre-made framework; time is money). |
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I think the desperation working and toiling for a living is
overrated. I'm seriously considering taking a career break for a
few years (5 years) and starting my career again at the end. |
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Toiling for the extreme house prices is such a waste of life. I'm
at my youngest I should be following my dreams. |
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If you have a reasonable house deposit, you should think extra
carefully before buying a house. It's 25-30 years of debt that
gives you a place to die in. |
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Regarding where the money has gone: Billionaires love things
like immigration and women's rights
because they lower salaries for everybody. |
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Labour is objectively NOT a marketplace. There's no way for
me to put my sell bid in. |
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//If you have a reasonable house deposit, you should think extra carefully before buying a house. It's 25-30 years of debt that gives you a place to die in.// |
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Unfortunately that attitude will see you renting for the rest of your life.
Property increases in value, (yes there are circumstances where this is not true, but for the most part there are far fewer investments which are safer... and remember, location, location, location), so for round figures say you buy a place for $300,000.
Both the down payment and every single payment you make from that point onward go to your future self so you've literally not technically spent anything. You've just indefinitely borrowed from your now self instead of funding a landlord.
If the property doubles in value in ten years you've only paid like a quarter of its worth and yet when you sell it the price has doubled. |
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You've just turned a down payment, and what would have been rent to someone else, into a few hundred grand in the bank for the cost of about fifty thousand dollars... which went right back in your pocket! |
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That is not wasting your youth. |
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It is ensuring that you actually have a roof over your head later in life... 'to' die in.
Might even be able to help a few others attain the same.
If no inheritance has been left to you, and you resent it as I do, then... it just means that you must be the one to leave something behind so as not to be resented in turn. |
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//Labour is objectively NOT a marketplace. There's no way for me to put my sell bid in.// |
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That is the difference between Labour and Skilled Labour.
You pay your dues, you hone your trade, you become extremely good at your job, and the day will come when customers will outbid one another for your services.
There is no shortcut for that.
You either become Skilled or you don't. |
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It's the best advice I can give. Break away from paying rent at all costs.
Yes, it seems like you're wasting your best years struggling... |
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...but then you get to find out that they are the only years you can. |
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Yeah! Shame on those fools who don't dig through their couch cushions and find enough money to buy a house. Anyone who doesn't have at least a few hundred thousand dollars to throw around is worthless. |
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It bothers me that the podium on the right has a different number of planks. |
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I'm not sure I understand those comments, but if you are implying that I look down on folks without cash you could not be more wrong.
I'm sorry if that is how it came across. |
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I was raised a welfare brat, struggled for decades, managed to figure out how to get out of the trap, and now do my best to help those around me do the same. |
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I don't like the game any more than you do, but refusing to play it is self defeating, and counted on by those who run this shit-show.
Do I think that the rules need to change? Yes.
Do I think I have even a snowball's chance in hell of changing things without wealth?... No. |
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So... I can either remain ineffectual or figure out a way to finance that change, and that's what I am doing. |
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Allow me to rephrase: Simply advising people to spend money they don't have is not helpful, even if it would be a good investment. |
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// Break away from paying rent at all costs// I disagree completely. |
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At present there are two main ways to secure land to live on (I say land because land is what costs money... as [ns] points out, houses are cheap as chips.) |
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Way 1, "buy" which means that over the course of your life you pay £xxxxxxxxxx out, and you have occupancy rights to a nice place until you die and then you have nothing. |
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Way 2, "rent" which means that over the course of your life you pay £yyyyyyyyyy out, and you have occupancy rights to a nice place until you die and then you have nothing. |
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For x<y it is better to buy than rent, all other things being equal. For x>y it is better to rent than buy, all other things being equal. |
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For me, y is significantly less than x, so why should I give up this rather nice place where I have a great quality of life, to buy somewhere much worse? |
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To address the original point though, the first definition has to be "unfairness". |
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How do you define what is fair and what is unfair? |
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[pocmloc] - a very good question. Unfairness may not
be the same thing as an unequal distribution of
capital, opportunity, talent, ability, luck, etc. |
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The conversation is an important one, but I don't see how this is
a database. |
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You can think about unfairness on a micro individual level. Society is the aggregate of individual actions, in the same way that physical properties of materials and objects is the aggregate of atomic and subatomic properties. |
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Think of your personal spending, for example on food. By purchasing your food and supplies from one person or organisation, you are actively choosing not to pay another. That is unfair. |
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Will the Unfairness Database get its own lisiting in
itself if someone reports it as infair? |
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It's a database because we're tracking all the ways life can be
unfair. |
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The definitions depends on the submitter. |
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I suspect it would have to be community moderated like
Slashdot. |
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You get points and metamoderate moderations. |
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If the community agrees your being treated unfairly, you get
rubber stamped into the database. |
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What if the community treats you unfairly by not listening to your submissions? |
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Some of the most successful, least murderous, revolutions of
recent times were the ones in Easterm Europe at the end of the
Cold War, and they focused on systemic change and *not* on
punishing "culprits". |
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Or, by "culprits", did you mean "causal factors", not "culpable
individuals"? |
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//For me, y is significantly less than x, so why should I give up this rather nice place where I have a great quality of life, to buy somewhere much worse?// |
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Perhaps you shouldn't, there is also maintenance to consider. If you rent that headache is someone else's. |
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Here's the thing though; you rent for 25 years somebody else keeps your money.
You buy a dwelling and within five years time it has increased in value. A mortgage is as cheap as rent. You sell. Not only has every cent of what would have been rent gone back into your pocket the excess value does as well. |
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Rent, pay somebody else.
Own, pay your future self. |
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Don't want to sell? Fine. Remortgage and now you pay half of what someone else pays for rent.
In the long term you are still only paying your future self instead of a landlord. |
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Well, buying is indeed often a good decision, and I'm glad it's
worked out well for you, [2 fries]. |
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On the other hand, if it's really a no-brainer, then why do banks
lend you money to buy the house, instead of buying it
themselves and then renting it to you? |
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I would suggest looking in a market where the cost
of living is lower than where you are, perhaps? The
Midwest is really very nice and peaceful, if a bit
boring. |
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//if it's really a no-brainer, then why do banks lend you money to buy the house, instead of buying it themselves and then renting it to you?// |
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Because they already have money so interest on loans is easy guaranteed income without maintenance headaches. Once you have wealth it is easy to increase it. When you're starting out with nothing and have to struggle to attain it then saving a down payment and buying property is the way to go. |
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It might seem unfair that there is such a vast
universe and people live on such a small (in
comparison) earth only. Hopefully there will be an
engineering solution to this problem before the
greater unfairness of the earth's obliteration near the
end of the sun's life-cycle. But my understanding is
of course quite limited, and I like to think that
somehow it all makes sense. |
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[sninc] I think that's covered by //I'm not talking about unfairness of height, intellectual, credibility or any biological unfairness//. |
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//Because they already have money// Not true. They literally create the money when you take out the loan, by writing the mortgage on both sides of the balance sheet. You are paying through the nose for giving them the privelege of creating money. |
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//Because they already have money//
//Not true. They literally create the money when you take out the loan, by writing the mortgage on both sides of the balance sheet. You are paying through the nose for giving them the privilege of creating money.// |
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Ah, but that is a fairly recent development. At one time gold was held in reserve for every dollar lent out. Now only ten percent must be held in reserve and the interest on this non-existent money is why we have rampant inflation.
But then the wealthy were once taxed 90% on their income as incentive to spend their money expanding their businesses to keep from giving it all to the government and now can loop-hole their way to paying less tax than minimum wage employees. |
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Everything is bass-ackwards now and we're all going to hell in a Ponzi scheme hand basket. |
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^True
When money doesn't have a decent/sane value tie to reality, everything becomes a ridiculous auction, which the large proportion can't afford and the economy starts to lose it's base existence. |
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// Everything is bass-ackwards now and we're all going to hell
in a Ponzi scheme hand basket. // |
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I cannot justify working my ass off for something as mundane
as property. |
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The prices are out of reach. |
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// Now only ten percent must be held in reserve// Not true either. There is merely waffle and hand-waving about "capital adequacy". Given that the capital consists of bonds and other financial instruments underwritten by property loan-books, you are literally paying a huge proportion of your life earnings to rich bankers just so they can invent big numbers. |
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Well... My gut told me which city was going to boom next so I moved my family there, leveraged myself to the hilt and bit off a mortgage for $157,000 house in a nice neighbourhood. It had been a rental for 6 years prior to taking possession, was completely trashed, and took 37 trips to the dump just to clean up the back yard. I spent 17 years renovating that place while working full time and holding on by the skin of our teeth. We sold that place 3 years ago for $790,000. |
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Now I'm doing it again. This time it's even more trashed with a $450,000 mortgage and I plan to have this payed off within 5 or 6 years.
I will then be mortgage free and since I'm renovating this one full time 7 days a week we should have more than a million in equity by the time I pay it off.
I don't ever intend to sell because, at that point, it has the potential to bring in more income than its purchase price every year for the rest of my life. |
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As much as I hate dealing with banks I couldn't have done that without the initial loan to start with. |
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Now I just need to figure out ways to produce our own electricity to get out of paying those crooks... and then I plan to spend my days cranking out one widget after another in the mad scientist laboratory I intend to die in, hopefully in some spectacularly bizarre fashion. |
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[2 fries shy of a happy meal]; I like the way you think.
If you're going for full self-sufficiency, don't forget "out-
goings" (sewerage, rubbish, recycling) as well as in-comings
(fresh water, electricity, comms). |
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This town is unincorporated so everything here is on septic systems. I have upgraded the first of three systems I have to replace.
Pulled 10,000 ft. of cat-6 cable as overkill for future bandwidth requirements.
There is a creek on the property if crap hits the fan but until then this place is zoned commercial so the incoming water is set at a fixed rate no matter how much we use, (unless water restrictions are in effect) and nobody seems to realize that I can use that incoming water pressure to run Pelton generators and pretty much turn my electrical meter back to zero with just that one adaptation. There are several electrical generation schemes I have in mind and Fortis, (our power company) has set things up so that any power you provide over and above your own requirements they will pay you a wholesale price for. It's pennies on the dollar, but to get cut a cheque at the end of every year rather than a monthly electrical bill will be sweet. It will also allow me to keep my rental rates low since neither the mortgage nor the power bill will be a factor.
My brother and I have set up a small band saw mill out back and have about five years worth of dead standing timber to harvest for post and beam construction and the campers buy my off cuts for firewood in the summer season. |
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"If" crap hits the fan after I I have everything in mind up and running this place could house hundreds of people and the meat won't rot in powerless freezers. |
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[2 fries] you're living the dream for the rest of us - keep it going for all our sakes. Land, independent
income, a man truly the king of his castle, none of that comes cheap, takes a *long* time, and a *lot* of
hard, hard work - and perhaps a little luck, but as my wife's father used to say whenever someone
complimented him on his success, "Isn't it funny, the harder I work, the luckier I get?" |
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I think there's a point in anyone's life where they look at the efforts they're making, and realise you
have to find a way to set up some kind of ratchet, so that the effort you spend winding the wheel today
doesn't get unwound as soon as you let go. That ratchet could be investing in your own property, it
could be building a portfolio of design work, it could be learning skills or building life experience. The
point is, you need a way to grow something so that by the time you're old and worn out, you don't have
to keep working just to stay afloat. |
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My pet theory is that much of this is down to the inflationary way that governments (since the
decoupling of currency from gold in the 1970s) making debt a great deal easier to deal with, and
causing that productivity/wages gap to keep on expanding. The other driver is technology - where a
person equipped with technology can today do a lot more than an equivalent person with older (or no)
technology. When the wages are being worked out, they're measured against the equivalent person
using old technology, so wages get out of whack with production - and inflation. That double whammy
inflates the price of things that aren't "produced" like real estate. It wont make anyone feel any better,
but renting has existed for many thousands of years, but this asset-price bubble we've all experienced in
the last 50 is not due to there suddenly being a glut of greedy landlords gobbling up all the houses.
There's not enough of them to corner the market, and if there were, people would get wise and just
build more houses. |
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If you wanted property to be affordable, I think you need to abolish inflation. A great deal of what looks
like asset growth just reflects currency debasement. 50 years ago, house prices in the UK would have
been counted in 4 digits. Wages have increased too, but just not by as much. It's difficult to know the
true value of something when its value is always shifting. |
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But then, we've also had a period where a great deal of stability has existed in the developed world.
That might owe something to governments finding a way to avoid the worst economic consequences of
bad management that they used to have to deal with that would cause famine, woe, mass
unemployment and revolution at the drop of a hat - so whilst it certainly is unfair to some, it might be
interesting to consider how unfair widespread warfare and unrest might have been instead - how do you
measure the unfairness of something compared to possible or likely unfairnesses that might have been
the alternative? That period of stability appears to be threatened today by a number of factors, not
least the way people who are aggrieved are courted by freeloading populists and criminals.
They do promise a great deal, and they do a great job of sounding like they can provide solutions, but
so far, based on what we've seen them deliver, it's largely been public money into their, and their
friend's pockets, and very little else, other than chaos, division and unrest. |
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We should ignore injustice whenever we find it - just approach the problem with a cool head and an
objective, rational mindset, otherwise there's a chance that change for change's sake will bring about
an even more inequitable set of circumstances. |
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// We should ignore injustice whenever we find it - just
approach the problem with a cool head and an objective,
rational mindset, otherwise there's a chance that change for
change's sake will bring about an even more inequitable set of
circumstances. // |
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That's scary. I've renamed the idea. |
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Oops, sorry - typo on my part - We should*n't* ignore
injustice whenever we find it!! |
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[2 fries] much respect for the work you have done and what you have created. But as [zen tom] says, I think this is more about you and your projects - you have used the land and property as a way to turn your labour into capital and to set yourself up well. |
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The reason I bristle about rent vs buy is because I truly believe that there are other ways to do this. I have thought on and off about self-sufficiency, and getting a house and land, but at the end of the day I decided I didn't want that to be my life. I would rather someone else did that - someone like you. If you were over here doing that I would gladly rent from you for life, and then use my time and efforts to build my own capital in my own way. |
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Two halfbakers boned the idea of tracking unfairness (or
injustice)
trends. And mind you the idea is not about tracking
people! |
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Chronologically, the bones came to this idea via the strong
link to rent and presumably, from there to the notion that
the unfairness tracking site will be skewed with similar
topics that are actually essential just as the rental topic is
in their opinion. |
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But this is being unfair to the idea. What if it would be
possible to
categorize the topics and vote
on whether they are unfair in the first place, and discussing
that as
well. |
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That would make for a very interesting website. You have
two layers: 1. Is it unfair? 2. Topic tracker - assuming it is
in fact unfair. |
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I might make a site for it, I have another idea, the misery
database which was boned here too. |
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But the point is you understand the idea pashute! |
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Sorry [chronological]. I didn't mean to sidetrack your idea with personal crap. It just seemed relevant and I really have only my own experience to draw on. In my opinion there should be a minimum standard of life for every human. No matter the situation, you are not allowed to go without certain inalienable rights to education, shelter, food, hygiene, medical aid, dental visits, clothing, etc. Want to climb higher than that? Well then now you've entered capitalist territory and fairness is... more fluid.
A level playing field where homelessness no longer exists would be fair. |
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//as my wife's father used to say whenever someone complimented him on his success, "Isn't it funny, the harder I work, the luckier I get?"// |
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S'truth. In the handbook there should be a footnote informing us poor bastards that; attaining kingship feels a lot like running a lifelong gauntlet to break out of a prison with beatings continuing until moral improves, and that you will always be in over your head even if you do get out... so just bloody well get used to it already. |
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I happily sentenced myself to ten years of double-time when I moved my family. Turned into seventeen years, due to good behaviour (no good deeds go unpunished), with a few months of triple time thrown in for good measure, and a year and a half of it with a torn acl unable to bend my knee while still setting tile waiting ten months for an MRI.
<shudders a little>
I figure I've got about five more years left on my sentence before I'm out for good. |
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I can do five more years of double time standing on my head. |
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[pocmloc] I get where you're coming from, I just...
...You get where I'm coming from too right? You will never see any of the money you pay another person as rent ever again. It's gone. If you find a way to own a dwelling though, even if you don't live there and somebody else pays the mortgage in rent to you while you while you rent elsewhere... it becomes wealth over time because of inflation, see? |
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//You will never see any of the money you pay another person// |
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On a facile level, you never see the mortgage interest either, and you also never see the investment returns you could have made if you had put the capital elsewhere. |
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But there are many different ways of looking at this. If you take a systems-level view, then once you pay out money, you never see the money again, instead you receive goods and services. But money is not really very important, I don't have very much by the standards of my friends and relations, but I have a higher quality of life than them because I can do other people's wage-work less and live in the most amazing place (which I don't and could never "own"). And I put all my time and effort into my own artistic and research projects which I have to say sound a bit like yours in their all-consuming nature. |
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I recommend Philip Ball's book "Critical Mass" for some interesting views on Human Society as a complex system of systems, and how ill-informed adjustments at one place cause quite surprising outcomes in others. |
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//there should be a minimum standard of life for every human// I would agree with all this, except I am not so clear on how it should be implemented. Ball's system view would suggest there will always be some people who fall through the gaps, some who deliberately withdraw themselves from the system and still complain about it and try to undermine it, some people who actively game it for their personal enrichment, and others who will actively campaign against it and whip up anti-system sentiment amongst those who do benefit from it. Doesn't mean we (as Human society collectively) should not aspire towards it, but it has to be built in a resilient way that acknowledges its imperfections and includes structures to protect against abuse and misuse. |
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//inalienable rights to education, shelter, food, hygiene, medical aid, dental visits, clothing, etc.// |
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An astute observation, with only two minor flaws. 1) None of those things is inalienable, and 2) None of those things is a right. |
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But that's exactly the point! If you can say something 'should' be inalienable, then it isn't inalienable and never can be. If you can say something 'should' be a right, then it is not a right, and never can be. |
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A right is something that is not wrong. It's not something that someone can give you. |
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Inalienable means unable to be taken away. |
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This is not about what something 'should' or 'shouldn't' be; it's about a fundamental misunderstanding of what inalienable means, and what rights are. |
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Take dentistry, for example. Someone hangs up a sign that says 'Free statist utopia dentistry'. You walk in with a toothache. You get hit over the head and locked in a closet. What happened? You were seperated from - deprived of - alienated from - the dentistry you expected. It was no more 'inalienable' than snow is unmeltable. Likewise, your expected dentistry was never, and could never be, a 'right' because that's simply not what rights are. Besides, dentists are not naturally occuring substances. |
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[spidermother] you need to register with a different dentist. |
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It's not too bad. The closet is a nice, quiet, dark place to recover from this headache. |
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Seriously though, if you pointed out that the Pentagon appears to waste enough resources to provide everyone on the planet with a basic standard of living, and that that seems wrong, I would be in complete agreement. |
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If you asked me what should be done about it, I would answer 'Nothing at all! Stop doing things about things! All of the so-called solutions - the New Deal, Medicare, Medicaide, Obamacare, on and on - all of them just bring in a new clusterfuck of corporate slavery, and a new bunch of problems for people to 'do' something about. There has ALWAYS been free medical care; long before the state stuck its meddling nose into peoples affairs, it was the established custom to provide free treatment to anyone who couldn't pay. And as for such insanities as 'free education' being equated with state-funded compulsory schooling, again two minor problems: 1) it's not free (either as in beer, or as in freedom), and it's not education.' |
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When people are left alone, things generally get better for everyone - including the most disadvantaged - simply because most people are almost, but not quite, entirely monstrous. |
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All this talk about injustices and nobody's mentioned
the unjust failure of government to implement a
eugenics program: pay rich, smart people to have 5+
children each. It's wrong to make future
generations suffer more for no reason. |
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I say this to highlight the wide range of opinions
about what "justice" is, and the difficulty of "having a
conversation" about questions of right and wrong. |
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//government ... eugenics program// <link> |
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I tend to think that if you're not a psychopath, your basic idea of what seems fair and just is probably good enough. |
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Once you cross over to the Dark Side - imagining that you're 'helping' people by meddling in their affairs, or imagining that a gigantic gang of thugs called the state can 'help' everyone by meddling in everyone's affairs - you're pretty much doomed. |
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Okay maybe inalienable was a poor choice of words.
Sorry.
Let's just say that if I held the position of Benevolent Planetary Sovereign it would be one of my decrees.
No human being is allowed to drop beneath what any of the rest of us would want if we were in their shoes.
As a species we could only go up from there. |
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It's not communism because the paths to wealth are open for the taking... but 'those-who-can' just make sure that 'those-who-can't' don't needlessly suffer.
It is done now on a grass-roots level, (for absolutely no profit or recognition), but seems to be abandoned the closer one gets to a large city... |
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Small groups of humans watch out for one another.
Large groups of humans tend to cannibalize due to competition for those very basic rights.
Maybe rights isn't the right word either...
...'Expectations should situations be reversed' might be a more apt phrase. |
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//It is done now on a grass-roots level, (for absolutely no profit or recognition)// And that's the place to leave it. |
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Let's just say that if I were offered the position of Benevolent Planetary Sovereign, I like to think that I would do the right thing, and graciously decline. |
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As for eugenics? My stand is that it is a complete crock of shit. |
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Eliminate diversity = Eliminate your species. |
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I am reminded of the species of moth which were all white with black speckles on their wings. A few mutants were born black with white speckles.
A forest fire wiped out their territory. Suddenly every black speckled white moth got eaten because they stood out like sore thumbs to predators, and now the species consists of black moths with white speckles, with the odd white black-speckled one every now and then. |
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//I like to think that I would do the right thing, and graciously decline// |
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Tried that. Vociferously even.
It won't let me until I meet somebody better suited than myself whom I would give my allegiance to. |
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So far I just keep waiting for a; [none of the above] box on my ballot form. |
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Look, I completely sympathise with the idea that there 'should' be more fairness, and that people 'should' be rewarded for their good deeds; but I can't help seeing what happens in the real world when people imagine that those goals can ever be achieved by using political authority. |
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Have you considered, just for a start, that doing so deprives the people who are genuinely motivated to make things better (as opposed to the loud-mouth gossipping meddlers who just pretend to be so motivated) of the one thing that gives their lives meaning? |
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So... actually helping people is going to deprive those who desire to help from being able to do so?...
M'wha?... |
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Those who desire to help just help.
They would just endeavour to elevate those at the basic level then.
Like I said, nowhere to go but up. |
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So just remember fellow citizens and sufferers...
A vote for me, is a vote for you. |
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No, actually helping people is actually helping people. Creating authoritarian bureacratic control systems is creating authoritarian bureaucratic control systems - even if you imagine that doing so will help anyone other than the authoritarian bureaucrats. (It won't). |
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But that's what I'm talking about. A standard of living which you can not descend beneath determined by the what-would-I-want in-those-shoes scale. |
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If that isn't help I don't know what is. |
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Is a percentage of humanity going to abuse the system just because they are lazy shits?... Yes. |
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Who is going to provide that minimum standard of living? Is a percentage of humanity going to be treated as if they have a right to boss people around and take their stuff (ostensibly to redistribute it)? |
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HUGE price to pay. Totally unaffordable price to pay. Every time it's been tried, it does exactly what it says on the tin - a percentage of humanity is treated as if they have a right to boss people around and take their stuff. Then it metastasises into a hideous totalitarian nightmare. Every time. |
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Doesn't seem to be that way in Denmark. |
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An elected monarchy where king rides the bus just like every other simian wiping their asses. |
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Royalty were meant to serve, not abuse. |
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I really want to burst that bubble, and say that minarchism is an impossible dream. |
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For example, have you heard of a little thing called the USA? It was theoretically sold as a basically administrative organisation, that would facilitate interstate trade, mint coins, and so forth, but LEAVE THE PEOPLE ALONE and LEAVE THE REST OF THE WORLD ALONE. There was not 'supposed' to be a police force, a standing army, espionage agencies ... My, haven't we grown! |
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I've never been to Denmark; Switzerland is a more familiar (to me) example of a people who seem to have achieved a degree of fairness without too much tyranny. But is it possible that to the extent that that has happened, it is a cultural phenomenon rather than the result of a system? In other words, is it precisely because the Danes see the king as 'just zis guy, you know?', rather than as a political authority, that they are able to have a decent life? |
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For myself, I've mostly given up on 'should's and 'meant to's. I just look at what's going on, and make the best of it. When I noticed that the local crime syndicate (of the type which you may not have, if your region is 'unincorporated') were not doing anything remotely like what they 'should' be doing (if they weren't a crime syndicate), I asked for proof that I owed them anything, got lied to and threatened in return, sent them a nice letter saying I didn't voluntarily accept any of their services, and have been basically left alone for the past 6 years - i.e., no 'rates' notices, nothing (touch wood). I guess I'm a micro-successionist. |
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The place that I moved to is unincorporated that's true. The place I lived in for almost twenty years before that was not. |
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The problem with North America is that it is for sale.
I can not own land in the Philippines because I do not have citizenship. I can not own land in almost any other country because I was not born there. Yet all of North America is for sale. |
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What did they think was going to happen? |
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//In other words, is it precisely because the Danes see the king as 'just zis guy, you know?', rather than as a political authority, that they are able to have a decent life?// |
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Exactly! See?!
It 'can' be like that everywhere and 'will' be, hopefully sooner rather than later. |
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