4 ms·

> I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule. There are two

> I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule. There are two orthogonal concerns: authoritarian vs. democratic: whether ordinary citizens have a say in which laws are passed Centralized vs decentralized reporting: whether primary responsibility for discovering whether the law has been broken lies with the police (e.g. conducting patrols), or with citizens making reports (e.g. 911 calls). To be fair, neither extreme is desirable - 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime. But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare. Of course, enabling tenants to report on their landlords is not the cause of that social divide - it is simply a step in the wrong direction.

kyle-rb 3y ago
Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works. "Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management."
- solatic 3y ago
  > Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works. I'm sorry you feel that's an inevitability. There's the economic agreement, where it's mutually beneficial for the tenant to receive housing and the landlord to receive a rent check, and then there's civil relations. Better civil relations improve the economic agreements. "Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management." Again, the social divide is not inevitable. There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. The CEO of a Fortune 500 is not in the same position as the CEO of a struggling one-office startup who basically answers to her investors. Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust. If you cannot trust your leaders, start planning an exit. You are not doomed to spend your life working for only one employer in whom you have lost faith, and thus require the assistance of the law to protect you. Life is too short to force yourself to work for people like that.
  - kyle-rb 3y ago
    > Again, the social divide is not inevitable. Not inevitable, just the default and probably(?) the majority, in both the landlord case and the employer case. > There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. I mean labor vs management in the union/labor-relations sense of the words, where the management is representing the interests of the owners. > Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust. In the early stages of a company, I might be inclined to overlook things if I had equity, as is common in the industry. And there's a reason for that: my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited. If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
    - solatic 3y ago
      > just the default and probably(?) the majority One can decide whether to respond optimistically or pessimistically to that reality. > union/labor-relations sense of the words I disagree that unionization fundamentally sets interests of labor against their employer. Sure, sometimes they diverge, but happier labor is more productive. Having a channel to communicate common grievances, so they can be addressed, is a key ingredient for also making labor happier and improving profits. > my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited You're rationalizing. Without equity, you're still gaining - it's called your salary. You don't actually get equity in early stage companies; you get options on equity, and even if you decide to pay money to exercise those options, you have no vote in board elections, dividends are highly unlikely to ever be issued, and you cannot sell your shares unless a highly unlikely exit (which you have no control over) occurs. > If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. A, not all landlords suck; it is possible to find a small-time landlord who cares about the property and finding a good tenant (my mother, who owns a studio apartment she inherited, happens to be one of them). If you don't like your landlord, you should consider moving. B, splitting equity in real estate amongst several / dozens of people is a really bad idea; since everyone gets a veto, the more people who get a say, the more unlikely it is to achieve consensus on anything from repairs to renovations to selling to a developer so that land which has a few housing units on it can have dozens or hundreds of housing units on it.
jdewerd 3y ago
40 years of pressure-cooker zoning: not class warfare. Blatant tax advantages for capital: not class warfare. Reporting tax cheats: class warfare. Oh no! (Clutches heart dramatically.) How detramental to social cohesion! We must do something!
- solatic 3y ago
  > continuation of American class warfare > continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/: The act or fact of going on or persisting; the state of continuing in the same condition, capacity, or place; an extension by which something is carried to a further point.
  - jdewerd 3y ago
    "I spent 1 word giving lip service to side A and the rest of my post scolding side B. I am very fair and balanced." I admit, I could be wrong. Maybe if I go through your history I'll see attention paid to the prior rounds of class warfare in proportion to their severity rather than in proportion to your opinions. But I doubt it and it's getting late. To pick favorites, selective attention is all you need.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    >> continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/ /kənˌtɪn.juˈeɪ.ʃən/
redserk 3y ago
Abusing the market is also deeply detrimental to social cohesion. Many market actors have an expectation of fairness with the parties they transact with, but this expectation can only be realized if parties maintain some degree of honesty with each other. One set of actors (some landlords) is not being honest by withholding a very constrained resource (housing) from the marketplace. Their dishonesty is causing a direct impact to many tenants by artificially raising rents. The increasing cost of rent is very noticeable and only encourages a growing adversarial relationship between tenants and landlords.
dmoy 3y ago
> 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime Is it really though? Where I live (major US metro area with 4-5m population, middle of the city), response time from 911 if you're actively being murdered is like... 6-7 minutes on average. If it's not a tier 1 call, response time is slower than that. 6-7 minutes is an eternity during the act of a violent crime. Police don't have the capacity to save your life from violence.
- solatic 3y ago
  That's a fair point, and I'm not arguing people should rely solely on police for their personal security. I'm more pointing out that it's clearly correct and appropriate to report crime when your safety is in danger; that I'm not trying to argue for some extreme where crime is never reported to the police.
acdha 3y ago
> But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare. I just want to second all of the other people pointing out the logical flaws here. It’s rare for people to be neighbors with their landlords and almost non-existent for the large multi family buildings this is targeted at: if your grandmother is renting out a room, she’s probably not leaving the rest of the house empty hoping to creatively renovate out of rent-control laws. This is going to be used against landlords who’ve already broken the “neighbor” contract by letting their buildings decay to the point where it’s affecting other people, and refusing to rent rooms to people who need them because they don’t make as much profit as they want. Those are wealthy people looking for tax shelters, not your neighbors! As to the class war claim, I believe it’s been noted how the right-wing only deploys that particular distraction when it’s something which helps poor people. I would suggest that starting point for any skirmish in that war might be when a landlord lets their property decay to the point where it no longer meets the minimum legal standard but still expects people to pay full price to live there. Having to clean up the mess they created seems like an impressively mild form of warfare.

kyle-rb 3y ago

Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works. "Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management."

solatic 3y ago
> Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works. I'm sorry you feel that's an inevitability. There's the economic agreement, where it's mutually beneficial for the tenant to receive housing and the landlord to receive a rent check, and then there's civil relations. Better civil relations improve the economic agreements. "Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management." Again, the social divide is not inevitable. There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. The CEO of a Fortune 500 is not in the same position as the CEO of a struggling one-office startup who basically answers to her investors. Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust. If you cannot trust your leaders, start planning an exit. You are not doomed to spend your life working for only one employer in whom you have lost faith, and thus require the assistance of the law to protect you. Life is too short to force yourself to work for people like that.
- kyle-rb 3y ago
  > Again, the social divide is not inevitable. Not inevitable, just the default and probably(?) the majority, in both the landlord case and the employer case. > There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. I mean labor vs management in the union/labor-relations sense of the words, where the management is representing the interests of the owners. > Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust. In the early stages of a company, I might be inclined to overlook things if I had equity, as is common in the industry. And there's a reason for that: my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited. If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  - solatic 3y ago
    > just the default and probably(?) the majority One can decide whether to respond optimistically or pessimistically to that reality. > union/labor-relations sense of the words I disagree that unionization fundamentally sets interests of labor against their employer. Sure, sometimes they diverge, but happier labor is more productive. Having a channel to communicate common grievances, so they can be addressed, is a key ingredient for also making labor happier and improving profits. > my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited You're rationalizing. Without equity, you're still gaining - it's called your salary. You don't actually get equity in early stage companies; you get options on equity, and even if you decide to pay money to exercise those options, you have no vote in board elections, dividends are highly unlikely to ever be issued, and you cannot sell your shares unless a highly unlikely exit (which you have no control over) occurs. > If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. A, not all landlords suck; it is possible to find a small-time landlord who cares about the property and finding a good tenant (my mother, who owns a studio apartment she inherited, happens to be one of them). If you don't like your landlord, you should consider moving. B, splitting equity in real estate amongst several / dozens of people is a really bad idea; since everyone gets a veto, the more people who get a say, the more unlikely it is to achieve consensus on anything from repairs to renovations to selling to a developer so that land which has a few housing units on it can have dozens or hundreds of housing units on it.

jdewerd 3y ago

40 years of pressure-cooker zoning: not class warfare. Blatant tax advantages for capital: not class warfare. Reporting tax cheats: class warfare. Oh no! (Clutches heart dramatically.) How detramental to social cohesion! We must do something!

solatic 3y ago
> continuation of American class warfare > continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/: The act or fact of going on or persisting; the state of continuing in the same condition, capacity, or place; an extension by which something is carried to a further point.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  "I spent 1 word giving lip service to side A and the rest of my post scolding side B. I am very fair and balanced." I admit, I could be wrong. Maybe if I go through your history I'll see attention paid to the prior rounds of class warfare in proportion to their severity rather than in proportion to your opinions. But I doubt it and it's getting late. To pick favorites, selective attention is all you need.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  >> continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/ /kənˌtɪn.juˈeɪ.ʃən/

redserk 3y ago

Abusing the market is also deeply detrimental to social cohesion. Many market actors have an expectation of fairness with the parties they transact with, but this expectation can only be realized if parties maintain some degree of honesty with each other. One set of actors (some landlords) is not being honest by withholding a very constrained resource (housing) from the marketplace. Their dishonesty is causing a direct impact to many tenants by artificially raising rents. The increasing cost of rent is very noticeable and only encourages a growing adversarial relationship between tenants and landlords.

dmoy 3y ago

> 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime Is it really though? Where I live (major US metro area with 4-5m population, middle of the city), response time from 911 if you're actively being murdered is like... 6-7 minutes on average. If it's not a tier 1 call, response time is slower than that. 6-7 minutes is an eternity during the act of a violent crime. Police don't have the capacity to save your life from violence.

solatic 3y ago
That's a fair point, and I'm not arguing people should rely solely on police for their personal security. I'm more pointing out that it's clearly correct and appropriate to report crime when your safety is in danger; that I'm not trying to argue for some extreme where crime is never reported to the police.

acdha 3y ago

> But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare. I just want to second all of the other people pointing out the logical flaws here. It’s rare for people to be neighbors with their landlords and almost non-existent for the large multi family buildings this is targeted at: if your grandmother is renting out a room, she’s probably not leaving the rest of the house empty hoping to creatively renovate out of rent-control laws. This is going to be used against landlords who’ve already broken the “neighbor” contract by letting their buildings decay to the point where it’s affecting other people, and refusing to rent rooms to people who need them because they don’t make as much profit as they want. Those are wealthy people looking for tax shelters, not your neighbors! As to the class war claim, I believe it’s been noted how the right-wing only deploys that particular distraction when it’s something which helps poor people. I would suggest that starting point for any skirmish in that war might be when a landlord lets their property decay to the point where it no longer meets the minimum legal standard but still expects people to pay full price to live there. Having to clean up the mess they created seems like an impressively mild form of warfare.