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This is becoming a problem in farmlands too. Young farmers are unable to buy farmlands, they are forced to lease from huge landowners. It is zero risk investmen
by akudha 5y ago
This is becoming a problem in farmlands too. Young farmers are unable to buy farmlands, they are forced to lease from huge landowners. It is zero risk investment for these big landowners. Farmers do all the work, put in all the investment like tools (except the land) - landowners simply collect rent. Some of these people own hundreds of thousands of acres (Bill Gates, for example).
This is an ugly situation. This is not sustainable. At some point, we'd have a few hundred super wealthy people/corporations owning much of the desirable land and property. Everyone else would become just a peasant/tenant living in tiny apartments working all our lives just so we can have a tiny roof over our heads. This isn't hyperbole - one look at BlackRock should give us an idea in the direction this problem is going.
- Aeolun 5y agoOh, I know! We can give them the land for free, but instead we get to collect a tax on their produce. Of course they cannot leave this arrangement without immediately paying for all the land. I think we can call these people serfs.
- cutler 5y agoThe same applies to the whole rented sector. We're all serfs.
- xunn0026 5y agoLuckily Apple only wants 30% for selling an app your customer cannot otherwise load on their phone or table.
- imtringued 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28424989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28424989
- arp242 5y agoThis kind of system was sustained for thousands of years in many different cultures, so I wouldn't exactly call it unsustainable. I would very much call it ugly and undesirable though. My point here is that there is no guarantee that this will be solved just because it's "unsustainable". I don't understand why people aren't literally protesting on the street; we did so in the 70s and 80s ("geen woning geen kroning") and the situation was a lot less bad back then.